How Bridget Jones Got Her Groove Back

Hope is a hazardous thing for an avowed devotee of romantic comedies—but I had optimism anyway for the fourth Bridget Jones movie. It came straight from the source: Leo Woodall, who joins the franchise as Bridget’s modern love interest, told me that, though franchises aren’t always extended “for the right reasons…this one wraps things up very beautifully.” Hugh Grant, who was so committed to the sanctity of his rakish Daniel Cleaver that he sat out the last Bridget Jones film over issues with the script, also built up expectations: “It’s absolutely the best [Bridget Jones book], and I think it’s very funny and very, very moving,” told Vanity Fair. “When you see the film, you’ll be very moved.”

Maybe some men do keep their promises. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is an utter delight, the strongest entry in the romantic comedy franchise since 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Based on the 2013 novel by Helen Fielding, who also cowrote the franchise’s screenplays, the fourth installment follows Renée Zellweger’s hapless Bridget after the death of her husband Mark Darcy (a briefly returning Colin Firth). She enters her early 50s as a mother to two children—once again single, but under circumstances that guzzling vodka, belting Chaka Khan, and bungling soup recipes can’t fix. (Although her blue-tinged concoction from the original movie gets cleverly referenced in the fourth film.)

Without the assist of her standard vices, Bridget becomes overwhelmed by the pushy, often contradictory advice aimed in her direction. Then she picks up her pen, heads back to work as a TV producer, and joins a dating app that leads her into the well-toned arms of Woodall’s Roxster McDuff, a 29-year-old park ranger who might enjoy grabbing a beer with the youthful lover boys from Babygirl and The Idea of You. He is unfazed by Bridget’s tumultuous home life; upon rolling over a child’s doll left in bed after their first time, Roxster gamely quips, “How did that happen? I’m using protection.” But their affair’s expiration date becomes clear when Roxster drunkenly tells Bridget, “I wish I had a time machine,” shortly before introducing her to the casual cruelty of ghosting.

The Bridget of films past would fixate on this blow to the point of self-destruction. But now she has kids, a career, and, most poignantly, a collection of close friends who bolster her recovery. Sally Phillips, James Callis, Shirley Henderson, and Sarah Solemani reprise their roles as Bridget’s opinionated inner circle. Emma Thompson, who played Jones’s obstetrician in the third film, is also gloriously back; in one of the movie’s funniest recurring jokes, she keeps telling Bridget that there’s really no need for the two of them to keep in such close contact. Even Grant’s Daniel Cleaver—the man who captured Bridget’s heart but could never be the one to keep it—now shares a warmly flirtatious but otherwise platonic friendship with Bridget, showing how each character has evolved in all the right ways.

For once, Bridget’s future doesn’t feel dependent on her finding a knight in shining armor. That makes it all the more satisfying when Chiwitel Ejiofor’s uptight Mr. Wallaker, a science teacher at Bridget’s children’s school, enters the picture. Like Darcy, he’s a rigidly amused yin to Bridget’s free-spirited yang, and slots easily into the full-bodied life that Bridget has already established for herself. The echoes of Darcy lend themselves to some tender-hearted callbacks, like a first kiss in the middle of a snow-covered street. Wallaker feels familiar but also like a fresh start for Bridget and her brood, a nod to the odd cyclical rhythms that life sometimes finds.

In the capable hands of director Michael Morris, as well as writers Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan, Mad About the Boy becomes the uncommon fourth movie in a franchise that not only justifies its existence, but sticks the landing on a story that had admittedly lost its way over the years.

In retrospect, the Bridget Jones franchise tells the story of the romantic comedy itself. The first film arrived in 2001 amid the genre’s heyday, nestled between British blockbusters like Notting Hill and Love Actually. (Hugh Grant’s impact in this space shan’t be overstated.) Zellweger proved that a Texan-born movie star could credibly transform into an unlucky-in-love Londoner, earning her her first Oscar nomination in the same era when Julia Roberts nabbed a nod for Pretty Woman and Diane Keaton did for Something’s Gotta Give.

Bridget Jones’s slapstick-ier sequel, The Edge of Reason, received a far chillier critical reception. But it was still the highest-grossing romantic comedy of 2004, a time when other hits like 50 First Dates and Along Came Polly also leaned further into com than rom. Despite its economic viability, the mostly Thailand-set movie (the less said about that element, the better) seemed to fundamentally misunderstand what viewers found endearing about Bridget. We are meant to laugh with her misfortunes, not mock from above as she parachutes out of a plane and directly into a pigsty, a camera leering intrusively at her “wobbly bits.”

The series then took a breather and allowed Zellweger what sounds like a much-needed six-year acting hiatus. Over the course of the ensuing years, romantic comedies seemed to fall out of favor—prompting numerous articles asking whether the genre was really dead for good. But 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby emerged when the world seemed ready to embrace the rom-com again, if largely on streaming platforms like Netflix. (Frustratingly, the latest installment in the Bridget Jones universe is getting a theatrical run abroad but has been relegated to a streaming-only release in the States.)