Downhill all the way for Bridget

Last among sequels: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

10 April 2012

SCENE 1. Interior, day, the offices of Working Title Films. There are lattestained styrofoam beakers, many Biros and a slew of papers on a conference table. A speaker phone is prominently arrayed. In three swivel chairs sit three men in various pensive attitudes.

RICHARD CURTIS: (For it is he of the Lifetime Award for British Comedy, MBE, CBE, Red Nose supremo.) Okay, okay, let's try and move forward. Bridget has just left Mark Darcy lying under the duvet...

ANDREW DAVIES: (For it is he of the 15 million successful screen adaptations.) Is it patterned?

RICHARD CURTIS: I'm sorry?

ANDREW DAVIES: The duvet - is it patterned?

RICHARD CURTIS: Er ... does it matter?

ANDREW DAVIES: I think it matters. I mean, we don't want Bridget's flat to be too chintzy, her mother's so chintzy. I don't think she'd have a patterned duvet, I think she'd keep things simple.

ADAM BROOKS: (Tyro screenwriter brought in to inject new vigour.) Could it be black?

RICHARD CURTIS: Ooh no, that's far too louche, that's not Bridget at all. Let's ask Helen. Helen, what's Bridget's duvet like?

HELEN FIELDING: (Via speaker phone from Los Angeles, so rather indistinct.) Blue.

RICHARD CURTIS: Blue, great, blue. Got that Andrew? (All three men make a note on their scripts.) Now, she leaves Darcy and we have a kind of Dear Diary voiceover where she's saying she has been in a steady relationship for six weeks and that's (consults script) 72 fantastic shags. Are we all happy with that, "shags"?

ANDREW DAVIES: I'm happy with it.

ADAM BROOKS: Well, it does seem a little dated. A little Eighties, Sloane Ranger, lacy pie-crust collars, sleeveless anoraks, Laura Ashley headscarves, flat in Chiswick. I think "shag" is of a piece with "bonks" or "rumpy-pumpy". This is 2004, after all. I mean, elsewhere in the script we have her using the F-word.

ANDREW DAVIES: Ah, but only as an exclamation.

RICHARD CURTIS: That's right, Bridget would never use the F-word to describe having sex. She's not that sort of girl, is she Helen?

HELEN FIELDING: Shags.

... And so it goes on, the faintly preposterous spectacle of three middleaged men (I'm not sure if Brooks is middle-aged but he certainly ought to be) churning out a script for a romcom about a thirtysomething young woman. Critics often take a pop at Richard Curtis's depiction of London life as being "chocolate box", but, frankly, I'd settle for that any day. The problem with this film is that it's a Thatcher-era view of the teeming metropolis. Escapism I can take - I like it fine - but escaping into the Eighties, when Curtis was a young shagger, is a total nightmare.

There is something so plangently patronising about the tone of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and it wasn't there in the first film. Maybe it's because this is essentially a retread, with the only difference being that Bridget has Darcy at the beginning, then loses him, then gets him back. There is the same complicating presence of sex-addict Daniel Cleaver, the same "mates", the same passé, bigbeatsoundtrack, the same fat gags, fag gags (cigarettes and gays) and the same heartwarming moments.

The only differences are that this time Bridget goes global; we get to see her skydiving and skiing in the Tyrol (cue pratfalls), and having a mushroom trip in Thailand (cue poxy kaleidoscope camera effect), where she also ends up languishing in a Thai jail (cue chorus of hundreds of tarts-with-hearts singing Madonna, tee-hee).

This latter experience is something of an epiphany for our Bridge, realising, as she does, that just because Mark Darcy is an emotionally frigid, upper-middle-class Englishman who folds his boxers, it doesn't make him as morally bankrupt as a Pat Pong pimp. Coo-er! And so, after the vicissitudes, true love reasserts itself and off they go into the computer-generated Yorkshire Dales, one hopes forever.

I say "one hopes", because if I have to hear one more time how amazing it is that Renée Zellweger gained 20 pounds to play Bridget, I think I'll tear my own head off. Anyone would think that she was Brando playing Don Corleone in The Godfather the way people go on about it. I'll also do myself a mischief if I have to watch simpering Hughie Grant or pokerfaced Colin Firth strut their stuff again. About the only enjoyable scene for me was where the two have a fight in a Hyde Park fountain, and I sat there fervently hoping that by some miracle they would drown each other.

Of course, to call Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason a film is a bit of a category error. The producers must have selected Beeban Kidron as a director on the sole basis that anything she shot didn't look remotely filmic. Despite a big budget and plenty of exotic locations, this farrago has all the visual excitement of a travelogue intercut with an old episode of The Vicar of Dibley. There are the obligatory animated Hallmark Christmas-card vignettes, and one Love Actually-style sequence where the camera pulls back over the London rooftops to reveal thousands of couples canoodling in their garrets. Otherwise, it's one stodgy scene after another.

But, I hear you say, this rom-com isn't aimed at you, so no wonder you didn't like it. I take exception to that. I like a good rom-com, and I've also been known to cry at Andrex commercials. What I can't stand about this film is the way it talks down to its audience.

Years ago, when I worked in marketing, I went to make a pitch to a Major Publisher of Romantic Fiction. After a liquid lunch, one of the directors began to wax cynical about the readership for this pap. She told me that after exhaustive research they'd discovered that their readers came from all classes and age groups, but that they all drank too much and ate a lot of chocolates. "We have an acronym for them," she told me. "We call them SADS: Sub-Aspirant Depressives." Well, if you're a SAD, you'll love this film - and how sad is that?

Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason
Cert: 15

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Downhill all the way for Bridget

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