Welcome back, Bridget Jones!
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is one of the best rom-com sequels ever
Welcome to Girl Culture, the newsletter where Caroline Siede examines pop culture, feminism, and more. You can learn about Girl Culture’s mission here and support here.
First of all, thank you so much to everyone who liked and shared my list of 21 rom-coms you’ve (maybe) never seen before! That’s by far the most traction I’ve ever gotten on a piece I’ve written here and it made me realize just how powerful that Substack “restack” feature can be for reaching a new audience—so anytime you feel moved to reshare something I’ve written, please do!
Second of all, the reason I keep my Substack free is because I want everyone to be able to share in the girl culture fun or find a new rom-com rec without being met with a paywall. But if you are able to contribute to my work here, I would hugely appreciate it. You can become a supporter for $5 a month or $50 a year, which supplements both the free work I do here and the (frustratingly underpaid) work I do as a film and TV critic elsewhere. And if ongoing subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can also buy me a coffee on Kofi.
Third of all, Bridget Jones is back for her fourth film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and I thought it was shockingly good! Though I’m a massive Bridget fan, I just didn’t have high hopes for yet another sequel, especially one that went straight to Peacock here in the United States. But Mad About the Boy totally proved me wrong with its heartfelt look at grief and healing. As I wrote in my full review for The A.V. Club:
Where some rom-com sequels heighten their worlds beyond recognition, Mad About The Boy is actually the quietest, most grounded film in the Bridget series—a massive step up from the over-the-top 2004 sequel The Edge Of Reason and an even better return to form than 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby. It’s filled with tearjerking observations about what it’s like to lose a parent or a partner and somehow still find the strength to get out of bed each day. And while new-to-the-franchise director Michael Morris (To Leslie) and Normal People cinematographer Suzie Lavelle give the movie an amber-hued glow and a few nicely otherworldly touches, what makes the film sparkle is its screenplay. It’s an understatement to say that creator-screenwriter Helen Fielding knows these characters inside and out, given that she wrote the original Bridget Jones novels and contributed to all the past films. But it’s remarkable how “right” all the character evolutions feel here with her writing alongside Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan.
Of course Bridget would channel her funny, self-deprecating personality into being an absolutely incredible mother—messy and scattered but also playful and emotionally open. Of course her history and chemistry with Daniel Cleaver (a perfectly used Hugh Grant) would keep him in her life, even though the romantic tension between them is (mostly) gone. And of course her weird conspiratorial bond with her gynecologist (Emma Thompson) would evolve into a half-friend/half-therapist dynamic. The script makes all of Bridget’s returning relationships feel wonderfully lived-in, and the film is all the stronger for it.
Indeed, writing about Bridget Jones has been a cornerstone of my A.V. Club career for a while now. Back in 2018, I launched my rom-com column When Romance Met Comedy by looking at what makes the first film so special:
In Renee Zellweger’s hands, Bridget is both lovable and deeply flawed—and not just in a “let’s make our impossibly glamorous female lead vaguely clumsy in hopes of making her relatable” kind of way. Bridget’s wry, witty internal monologue is juxtaposed with her inability to be anywhere near as put-together in real-life. “I am the intellectual equal of everyone else here,” she mentally reassures herself at a fancy book launch, before utterly failing at making erudite small talk. All of this contributes to Bridget having an actual personality, which is something lesser rom-coms often fail to give their female leads while striving to make them universally appealing.
So much of the experience of being a woman is about being made to feel perpetually inadequate—of being judged by others, then facing even harsher critiques from yourself. Bridget Jones understands this, which is why its romantic hero isn’t the dashing knight who sweeps you off your feet; he’s slightly awkward, and he likes you warts and all. The film doesn’t get too precious about it, either. When Bridget tells her friends what Darcy said to her, they swoon and mock it relentlessly—another moment that feels entirely true-to-life.
And this month I got a chance to write a follow-up to that early column entry, one that looks at the Bridget franchise as a whole and the unusual way its heroine’s story has unfolded over the past three decades:
The first time I watched Bridget Jones’s Baby, I found it kind of depressing that this rom-com couple I’d loved for 15 years weren’t still together. And it’s hard not to feel the hand of cheap formula demands at play when it comes to that decision. The Bridget Jones series loves a high-stakes love triangle with a climatic finale. Here it’s Patrick Dempsey who steps in to vie for Bridget’s hand as one of the potential fathers of her unplanned pregnancy, even as the film ultimately reaffirms that Mark really is the love of her life. Yet that desire to bring sweeping romance to the forefront of each individual film means the overall arc of Bridget’s life is anything but a fairy tale.
The longer I’ve sat with the series, however, the more I’ve come to appreciate that messiness. Not everyone gets a fairy tale romance in real life, and as a rom-com heroine who’s specifically designed to be realistic and relatable, perhaps it’s fitting that Bridget doesn’t either. “Can’t go back and keep making same mistakes,” she jokes in her diary. “Must keep moving forward and make new ones!” It’s an optimistic take on the “unlucky in love” trope from a franchise that’s always understood that Bridget’s friends, family, career, and sense of self-worth are just as important as her love life.
In a media landscape that’s more than happy to celebrate men with Peter Pan syndrome, it’s refreshing to see a woman in her 30s, 40s, and beyond whose messy flaws are seen as sympathetic and likable. The original Bridget Jones set out to tell the story of a lovable woman who doesn’t quite have her life together and the series has stuck with that theme for 24 years. Bridget may never entirely grow up and settle down, but maybe she doesn’t need to. With or without a romantic partner, we still love her, just as she is.
If you’ve seen Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, let me know what you thought about it in the comments!
Other stuff I’ve worked on lately: I wrote about Captain America: Brave New World’s frustratingly lack of thematic cohesion for The A.V. Club and reviewed NBC’s fun new murder mystery soap opera, Grosse Pointe Garden Society, for The Boston Globe. I also dove into the 1970s blaxploitation career of living legend Pam Grier for this month’s Women of Action column.
Went to see it over the weekend and was surprised as well by how good it was. While I've always liked Bridget, I didn't expect the fourth movie in the series to go this hard. But it was sad and funny and hopeful and it offered a nuanced exploration of grief and it was so lovely overall.
LOVED Mad About the Boy. Wept one morning watching it. It had no business being so good.