The Timelessness of Bridget Jones

To watch Bridget Jones’s Diary today is to climb into a time machine whisking us back to more treacherous times, circa 2001. Bridget’s boss actively flirts with her via office Email, commenting on how tiny her skirt is, and she responds by launching into a torrid affair with him. Bridget feels terrible about her body and believes that achieving some mythical ideal weight will bring her happiness. Everyone smokes, a lot. The movie is so out of step with how we think and feel today that it’s…completely delightful, perhaps even more so than it was upon its release. Bridget Jones’s Diary is, of course, a snapshot of its time—all movies that are 25, 50, 100 years old are going to look a little strange to modern eyes. But that’s the value of stepping away from a film you may have loved decades ago. The point isn’t to say that things were better then, or even that things were worse. It’s just that movies whose plot points have gone out of fashion can still tell us plenty about what we want from art, even if they’re sometimes things we’re afraid to ask for. The rules may change, but our unspoken desires don’t always shift in accordance.

The Bridget Jones movie franchise now includes three sequels. The first two were 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (in which Bridget ends up in a Thai jail) and 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby (in which Bridget finds herself pregnant at age 43, and isn't sure who the father is). The latest installment is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which, rather than getting any U.S. theatrical release at all, is streaming on Peacock. (Like the earlier movies, the new film is adapted from original material by novelist and newspaper columnist Helen Fielding: her novel, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, was published in 2013.) In this fourth film, directed by Michael Morris, Bridget, again played by Renée Zellweger, is now a grieving widow with two young kids, Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic). Her husband, human rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), died four years earlier while on a mission in Sudan; he appears briefly in the movie as a ghost, and these brief glimpses of him are perhaps unsurprisingly touching.

The plot mechanics of Mad About the Boy kick off, predictably, with Bridget’s friends (played by an array of appealing actors returning from the earlier films, including Shirley Henderson and Sarah Solemani) urging her to jump back into the dating pool. As an adorably youthful-looking fifty-something, she doesn’t have much trouble attracting candidates, including a 29-year-old aspiring biologist cutie-pie (Leo Woodall) and her son’s seemingly stern but actually quite wonderful science teacher (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a marvelous actor who should have more chances to play the romantic lead). Bridget’s old on-again, off-again boss/beau Daniel Cleaver (played by the gloriously incorrigible Hugh Grant) drifts in and out of the story. Their shared history has turned them into a kind of family, which is one of the story’s finest elements, reflecting the way our relationships with old lovers can shift over the years, often in ways we can’t predict.

Read more: Bridget Jones and Daniel Cleaver Turned Out to Be the Real Love Story All Along

Mad About the Boy is designed to be satisfying to fans; it churns out the goods so the audience will feel the feels. Like the previous two sequels, it has its high points: Emma Thompson, who played Bridget’s fantastically deadpan gynecologist in Bridget Jones’s Baby (she also co-wrote the script), returns in Mad About the Boy, and the movie springs to life every time she shows up. But Zellweger, an actor who’s often charming and sometimes great, goes overboard in the winkling and twinkling department. It has also been decided, unwisely, that Bridget has somehow lost the desire or perhaps the ability to ever comb her hair. Bridget is supposed to be chaotic—that’s one of the things we love about her. But she never looked truly unkempt, even as an impetuous 32-year-old with a messy life. Why start now?

The intention of Mad About the Boy is to wrap up the series, leaving Bridget in a place where happiness is again within her reach. And it’s adamant that a woman’s sex life hardly needs to end as she inches into her fifties. All of that is comforting—maybe too comforting. There’s something safe and cozy about Mad About the Boy that made me long for the unruliness of the first film. Even if all of the Bridget Jones movies are essentially about the unpredictability of life and the benefits of facing it with candor and a sense of humor, the formula works best in the OG, perhaps because it captures so perfectly the sense of flying without a net that young people feel throughout their twenties and often well into their thirties. By that time, though, an unsettling urgency might be creeping in, a sense that you’ve got to get on with fulfilling your life’s dreams, whether that means finding a partner, having children, landing your dream job, or any or all of the above. As a young thirty-something, Bridget keeps a diary not just as a way of reflecting and recording, but perhaps as a way of manifesting all the things she’s longing for. That those goals are so elusive is part of the movie’s grand joke. That’s also what makes us come to love her, in her never-quite-right outfits, in the way she barges into any situation with a jaunty, assertive gait only to be met with humiliation. None of that bothers her for long, but she feels pain like anyone else. And, like everyone else on our planet at one time or another, she's simply lonely.

I often hear seemingly intelligent people criticizing this or that older movie for being “dated,” a distinction that means nothing. You may as well just say, “This movie was made at the time it was made.” There are all sorts of things in Bridget Jones’s Diary that you couldn’t, as they say, do today. Bridget’s mother (played by Gemma Jones), referring to Mark Darcy’s ex-wife, makes a nasty racial remark, though it should be noted that the point is to show how this character is ditzy and bigoted at once—it reflects badly on her more than anyone. Bridget is obsessed with her weight, considering herself fat and thus unlovable even though that’s far from the truth; women still obsess about weight, but the idea that we should accept our bodies as they are is more prevalent than ever. And everywhere you look in Bridget Jones’s Diary, someone is lighting up a cigarette, often at the dinner table: we just don’t do this anymore, and we shouldn’t, but those who came of age with this convivial (if unhealthy) habit are likely to feel at least a pang of nostalgia for those days of hanging out in a club or at a communal table, gossiping and canoodling among tendrils of smoke.

And then there’s the whole thing about Bridget’s boss, Grant’s Daniel Cleaver, making smirky, lascivious comments about her and her various physical attributes, which she responds to with curiosity and delight. It’s exactly what the word cringe, used today as an adjective rather than a verb, was coined for. We now have laws to prevent this sort of thing, which is as it should be. The workplace is for work. No one should be made to feel inferior or manipulated or, even worse, threatened into complying with a boss’s sexual advances.

And yet—the way Bridget welcomes Daniel’s advances is a pure example of the sort of thing we know we shouldn’t do but do anyway. (Their first assignation also occasions one of the greatest exchanges in the history of romantic comedy, involving Daniel’s awed and awesome response to Bridget’s granny pants.) In real life, through much of the 20th century, the idea of snaring and marrying the boss wasn’t necessarily taboo, providing you didn’t break up a marriage in the process: it was just one way for a woman to get what she wanted or needed. You certainly see it in pre-code Hollywood films: if you were a woman in 1932 watching Barbara Stanwyck sleep her way to the top in Baby Face, or Jean Harlow doing the same in Red-Headed Woman, you would of course know that what these women were doing wasn’t “proper,” but you’d root for them anyway. They were looking out for themselves the best way they knew how. And as the “sleeping with the boss” convention goes, Bridget Jones’s dalliance with Daniel Cleaver is relatively harmless: he isn’t engaging in any quid pro quo wheedling; there’s no devious “sleep with me or you’ll be fired” bargaining.

Even when you’re young and a little wild, sleeping with the boss is never a good idea: that goes without saying. But movies aren’t guidelines for how we should live. Sometimes we like to see our errors in judgment reflected on-screen, and Bridget Jones offers lots of that. It doesn’t hurt that Grant’s Daniel Cleaver, disreputable to the core—and, yes, sometimes cruel—is your classic irresistible bad boy. Maybe we’d like to legislate those away—but where’s the fun in that?

Bridget Jones’s Diary doesn’t end with an engagement ring or a wedding dress. It ends with a young woman who really enjoys sex finding herself lucky enough to land with a guy—Colin Firth’s uptight but sweet Mark Darcy—who offers her lots of it. It’s a movie, and a franchise, that’s smart enough to know there’s no such thing as a happily-ever-after. Whether you love or loathe Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, you have to give it this: It recognizes that happiness is never a hard stop. Sometimes you have heaps of it, and sometimes you have less, but with a dash of optimism and a sense of humor about yourself, you can always get by.

The 21st century hasn’t been a great era for romantic comedy, but it has given us one great heroine. Zellweger gave Bridget Jones her life on the screen, with her fantastically squirrelly line delivery, her half-awkward, half-resolute stride, her often touching wistfulness. Bridget often says the wrong thing; she smokes way too much and probably drinks too much as well; and perhaps once or twice or three times too often, she has chased after a guy in the rain or snow or some other type of unpleasant weather, while wearing a comically unsuitable outfit that unduly exposes her to the elements. She represents every foolish romantic mistake we’ve ever made, or at least thought about making, yet she’s unembarrassed by any of it. For her, bumbling through life is just another way of living it—but that’s what most of us are doing, whether we want to admit it or not.