12 February 2025

Bridget Jones after Mr Darcy

This fourth instalment in the series – which follows Bridget after the death of her husband – is the most moving.

Photo by Jay Maidment/Universal Pictures

There was always something improbable about Bridget Jones being able to afford her flat in Borough Market, but in Mad About the Boy we find her installed in even more delicious real estate: a supplement-ready townhouse close to Hampstead Heath, with a banana-yellow front door and wisteria climbing all over its gorgeous face. Bridget’s personal life, however, has taken a turn – though she has two children she dotes on, she’s sharply feeling the loss of her husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a human rights lawyer killed on a humanitarian trip abroad four years previously.

Bridge has also lost the other great man in her life, her father (Jim Broadbent), who made her promise on his deathbed that she wouldn’t just survive in his absence, she would live. And so she decides to, allowing a friend to sign her up for a dating app and generally resolving to mope less, work more and get out of her PJs for the school run.

The last Bridget Jones film was ropey, and the good news is that this one is much better: funnier, more sensibly plotted and far more moving. Several potential pitfalls have been swerved. Bridget doesn’t spend her time agonising about her weight, which is just as well, as Renée Zellweger couldn’t pass off as fat in this film however hard the costume department tried. Bridget is also less mean than she was in BJ3, in which her callous treatment of the two nice men vying for her affections gave the film an off-putting acridity.

But there are still problems, not least that Bridget’s entanglements with her two new paramours are neither convincing nor greatly involving. First off, there’s Leo Woodall’s lip-biting groundskeeper-stroke-biochemistry student, whom she meets while stuck up a tree. He is, he says on their first date, 28, until he clarifies that he’s joking: he’s actually 29. Bridget, by now in her fifties, is horrified, but the pair connect across the age gap via the language of physical love.

Then there’s paramour number two, Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher at Bridget’s children’s prep school. A stickler for order (he carries a whistle), he reveals at one point that he never got round to having kids as he was so busy being a teacher: you know, going over the times tables and things. You wonder, with concern, what he did with all those weekends, evenings and school holidays. Did he stare at a wall?

The heart of the film, and it has lots of heart, doesn’t lie with Bridget’s rather feeble new flames, but with the two scorchers we know and love already: dearly departed Darcy, who regularly pops up as a sort of gnomic apparition visible only to Bridget, and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who rides in to zhuzh the film whenever it’s in the doldrums. The Cleaver of old was an inveterate shagger, and it’s soothing to find him up to his usual tricks: he still spends his time cruising the King’s Road for talent, and has a vacant 20-something girlfriend who works as a model, poet and healer. But when a health “event”, as the euphemism goes, causes him to take stock, he comes to recognise the outsize role that Bridget has played in his life. As you’d hope, Grant wrings his lines for all the wry poignancy they possess; aside from Zellweger, who is lovable throughout this film, Grant is the best thing in it.

More touching still than Cleaver’s moment of existential vertigo is the hole that’s been left in Bridget’s children’s lives by the death of their father. At one point, we watch the two munchkins writing letters to Darcy and drawing him in heaven, then attaching these tributes to balloons and setting them free. Hokey as it is, it’s almost unbearable to witness, particularly given that the older of the kids is a kind of Darcy-in-miniature chess nerd with tidy hair who is “withdrawn” at school.

The film does sometimes feel like an overlong John Lewis ad, or a playlist of slightly lame pop songs overlaid with Bridget Jones-themed sketches. Scenes unfold that seem to have no idea what they’re for other than to show Bridget doing Bridgety things, like buying condoms or getting an allergic reaction to a lip serum.

Even so, Mad About the Boy is undoubtedly a good time at the cinema, and the script – co-written by Helen Fielding, who was widowed in 2016 – skilfully balances the comic and the tragic. For all the fun the film has dramatising the stresses of parenting – “I don’t want to be a mummy right now!” Bridget howls at one point – it also paints a refreshingly joyful picture of family life. And it’s balm for the soul to see Bridget making good on the promise she made her late darling dad, and learning to truly live after loss rather than just survive.

“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is in cinemas now

[See also: Bridget Jones’s hollow feminism]