Bridget Jones's Diary is the very popular movie
based upon the Helen Fielding book of the same name, starring Rene Zellweger as a 30something woman who wants
to straigthen out her life, quit cigarettes, flatten her stomach and,
most importantly, get herself a guy. She eventually gets to choose
between two men and, I think, gets the one she really wants.
Bridget Jones is a woman on a mission. She's tired of being a lonely, overweight, chain-smoking, slightly soused woman and wants to clean up her act. So she starts a diary, and promptly screws things up by sleeping with her spineless boss, Daniel Cleaver, played somewhat off kilter by Hugh Grant - he just didn't seem to fit the role. They actually seem to be doing swell, until he gets called back home on business while at a friend's house and she arrives there early and catches him boinking an American business partner. Turns out he's known her for a while and they are now engaged!
She spends lots of time in her cups with her 3 best friends, who also have screwed up lives, of course. There's the gay ex-singer/songwriter who's happy to live off his one hit record, the woman who clings to her abusive boyfriend, and the other woman who'll sleep with anyone. Together they try to prop each other up, sometimes even successfully.
Bridget final gets realizes that the stuffy lawyer Mark Darcy, played with a stiff upper lip by Colin Firth, who she has known since childhood, might actually make a pretty good match. He shows up at her door on her birthday and helps out in the kitchen where she is making a dubious dinner of purple soup (she used blue twine to hold the leeks together) and an altogether horrid jam of some kind. But then a drunk Cleaver shows up, and then Darcy and Cleaver get into fist-ac-uffs, perhaps the high point of the movie for me.
But she still picks Cleaver over Darcy, despite his womanizing ways. But when Cleaver can't promise any more than "I'll try to be better", she dumps him again, right in the road after the fight. But Darcy comes back and they might try again. But then he reads her diary and sees what a chump she thinks he is, so he slips out. But she chases him down and perhaps once and for all, they are together. I think. A few too many now he's lost, now he's found, for me.
Now admittedly a "romantic comedy" isn't supposed to make all that much sense, or be all that "real", but this carries it too far, without even the comedy parts. It seems so staged and deliberate, and not even all that funny. And watching a movie about a woman who has no self-respect at all, who's sole desire in life seems to be to get that man, just feels off in this day and age. Too much whining about get the right guy, lose weight, stop drinking and smoking etc. Ho hum, nothing all that much to be impressed by.
