This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Middle Aged Spinster For Now
Plot Overview
“Bridget
Jones's Diary” turns a new leaf for 2004 to find Bridget
(Renée Zellweger) at 33 in a renewed relationship with
“sex god and human
rights lawyer” Mark Darcy (Colin Firth.) After six weeks going
with him, she is yearning for marriage and a baby, but he not so much.
Their sex is great and their sex is straight. Her parents Pamela (Gemma
Jones) and Colin Jones (Jim Broadbent) are still wed and still in love
with each other. Their wedding was so important to them they are having one
again to renew their vows. They probably waited for the first wedding night
before having sex. Theirs is a good example for Bridget.
Darkening the horizon on Bridget and Mark is their class difference (“I'm never gonna fit in with your friends”) and different educational goals for potential offspring. And as good as her sex with him is, it was even better with her ex, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) who now wants a second chance and says he's reformed.
Ideology
We share Bridget's perplexity trying to work it all out, and the screenwriters have done us a favor in this visual format by giving us unpredictable motions to track on land, sea and air. Just to get us in the right frame of mind, we see the same in, (Prov. 30:18-19) “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”
“The way of an eagle in the
air” corresponds to Bridget's demonstration of sky diving on
the telly programme:
“Sit Up, Britain.” We see her in a plane at
6,000 ft. being coaxed by the producer
to jump out. Looking over an expanse of fields she complains, “I can't see anywhere
soft to land.” Neither can we. A wild jump lands her
in the (soft) mud next to some pigs humping. This opening scene portends
a lascivious plot like pigs in rut.
“The way of a serpent upon a rock” corresponds to neophyte skier Bridget on a ski mini-break in Switzerland. Her first time on skis is an accidental run on a competition slope where she gives, “a rather spectacular performance from a totally unknown.” After doing a little math—she's been with Mark for eight uneventful weeks—she skis into a pharmacy to purchase a pregnancy test kit to determine if she is carrying a “kinder.” Due to the language barrier she has to pantomime what she's after, a “girl mit boy” having done the deed and she wants to know the results. Yes, she knows where babies come from.
“The way of a ship in the midst of the sea” has a more complex correspondence in “The Edge of Reason.” The boat journey to an island in Thailand is placid. After Bridget eats the magic mushrooms, she is seen standing in the surf hallucinating colors. Darcy and Cleaver have an “ugly and pathetic” fight that ends up in a pool of water. And back home Bridget will be drenched from a van driving through standing water. That's more or less the way a pregnancy goes: there are long peaceful spells; there are the hormonal changes to a woman's body; if she has slept with more than one man during the critical period, there can be some conflict over who's the dad; and there's morning sickness.
“And the way of a man with a maid” is on a higher plane of difficultly to understand, both in this movie and in life application of the proverb. Mark and Bridget's “fatal incompatibility” doesn't make him a bad boyfriend, not in the sense of the Thai girls' boyfriends who were “hitting me, making me do drugs, and taking all my money.” Sure he wanted his son so go to Eaton and he folded his underwear, but get some perspective.
Anthropologist Desmond Morris—best known for his book, The Naked Ape—writes of human sexual relations: (247)The [sexual] preliminaries provide time for careful judgments to be made, judgments that may be hard to form once the massive, shared emotional impact of double orgasm has been experienced. This powerful moment can act as such a tight ‘bonder’ that it may well tie together two people quite unsuited to each other, if they have not spent sufficient time exploring each other's personalities during the sexual preliminaries.
In Thailand some sweeties sing a corrected version of (perfectionist) Madonna's, “Like a Virgin.” In a deleted scene Mark and Bridget are shown at a christening of an infant where on its behalf they “renounce satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God.” There seems to be a subtle lesson in this film that one does well to remain a virgin until marriage.
Production Values
“” (2004) was directed by Beeban Kidron. Helen Fielding wrote the novel and Andrew Davies the screenplay. It stars Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant. Zellweger handles well the British accent making it plebeian. Colin Firth as a dyed-in-the-wool barrister lacks chemistry with Zellweger. The rest of the cast does well with what they are given.
MPAA rated it R for language and some sexual content. It's engendered a sequel: “Bridget Jones's Baby” (2016). There were some psychedelic effects for the drug trip. I'm no fashion maven, but I'd say Bridget's getups were chick flick chic.
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
As much as I disdain frivolity, I was nevertheless charmed by Zellweger's character. The movie was more salacious than strictly necessary, but it included funny sex-ed material. See it for what it is, or not.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Decent action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Some well done special effects. Video Occasion: For Groups of Women. Suspense: Many moments of suspense. Overall movie rating: Three stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Morris, Desmond. Manwatching. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org