Games People Play. - Review - movie review

National Review, May 14, 2001 by John Simon

For all its success, I wasn't aware of Helen Fielding's bestseller Bridget Jones's Diary until the movie version was making tsunamis at the box office. It is the journal of a 32-year-old London "singleton" who works in publishing; drinks, smokes, and weighs too much; and has problems with men. She yearns for her boss, the dashing Daniel Cleaver, a notorious Lothario, from whom only a glass partition and an unknown number of skinnier and sexier girls separate her.

She also has a yen for Mark Darcy, a handsome barrister and serious fellow with, to be sure, an equally serious and jealous lawyer girlfriend. And she has a trio of quirky single friends encouraging her, as well as some married ones discouraging her with patronizing smugness.

The film quickly drops the novel's diary format. It was directed by Sharon Maguire with many a feminine touch, from a screenplay by Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, to both of which Bridget Jones bears a troubling resemblance), and Fielding herself, who may be the cutesiest of the trio, as a glance at her book suggests. The movie is, indeed, relentlessly cute in a crassly crowd-pleasing way. The audience I saw it with was in ecstasy over the emotional perils of the dippy Pauline, fluctuating between the cliche and the recherche.

Near the beginning of the movie, Bridget writes in her diary, "I suddenly realized that unless something changed soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine, and I'd finally die, fat and alone, and be found three weeks later half- eaten by wild dogs." When things go (comically) wrong, we get, "At times like this, continuing with one's life seems impossible and eating the entire contents of one's fridge seems inevitable. I have two choices: To give up, and accept permanent state of spinsterhood and eventual eating by dogs-or not. This time I choose not." That just about tells it all.

Actually, this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for romantically disadvantaged women, as Bridget ends up with both dreamboats vying for her, for both realize in due time that she is the answer to a manchild's prayer-thereby making the losers in the audience feel briefly like winners. Renee Zellweger shed her Texas accent for a British one, acquired twenty pounds by a reverse diet, and worked for a few weeks as a factotum in a publishing house-no sacrifice too great for turning into Bridget. She is a good actress and has the right understated looks, but the face slowly melting from joy to sorrow or vice versa, the halting or blurted-out speech, the baby talk laced with bravado are beginning to come across as formulaic.

For Hugh Grant, as Daniel, it took only a minor adjustment to switch from adorable bumbler to adorable cad. Colin Firth, on whose portrayal of Mr. Darcy in a BBC version of Pride and Prejudice Fielding modeled her Darcy, is indeed the very model of the strong, silent hero. By way of further cuteness, guests at a publishing party are played by Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, and other literati. But the movie cheats in various small ways. When Bridget, unalerted to the fact that a planned costume party has been switched to normal dress, comes as a Playboy bunny and is duly humiliated by the immaculate guests, she returns to her lover without removing so much as her bunny ears, to incur further improbable ribbing. And even the questionable novel ends on a less unambiguously happy note than this mildly meretricious movie.

--Another woman director, the Dutch Marleen Gorris, has come up with The Luzhin Defence, from the Nabokov novel better known hereabouts as The Defense. That third novel by the young author, written in Russian, and pronounced by the Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd "the first masterpiece," has thus far eluded my reach. But from books about Nabokov, I can deduce that Peter Berry's screen adaptation is as loose as an overbraised goose.

There is some justification for the freeness. In the novel, Luzhin's wife has no name and is merely Luzhina (Mrs. Luzhin); even Luzhin's own full name is not revealed till the last page. (Nabokov loves mind games.) In the movie, Natalia, as she is called, is left waiting at the altar, Hollywood style; she rushes back to the hotel, only to find . . . I must not tell you what. Then, after Nabokov's ending, comes the added Gorris-Berry ending, totally feminist and highly un-Nabokovian, not to mention wholly unlikely.

Nabokov was a chess expert and columnist. As early as 1917, Boyd tells us, "Vladimir began to compose his first chess problems, a hobby that would . . . become a training ground in artistic strategy. Nabokov was never quite as good as might be expected as a conversationalist . . ." Here you have the novel in embryo. Luzhin, though a genius at chess, is inarticulate and cannot make small talk. In social situations, he is either preternaturally taciturn or bursts into the most inappropriate ejaculations-something the movie ferociously overdoes.