After spending the 1980s wallowing in unremunerative pomposity, English filmmakers changed their ways, building a successful if schizophrenic commercial industry out of two kinds of formulaic blockbuster. On the upmarket end were literary adaptations, of which the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) was the masterpiece. On the downmarket end were films of truly towering idiocy, of shallowness pushed so far it attained a kind of grandeur — movies that carried insipidity where the cheapest Hollywood hucksters feared to tread. The Full Monty and Brassed Off take the laurels here, films so moronic that only the English could have made them.
And now we have Bridget Jones’s Diary. Helen Fielding’s bestselling book chronicled a publishing yuppie turning thirty-three, who seeks to lose weight, quit smoking, and (thereby) win here self a man. The film, directed by Fielding’s friend Sharon Maguire, is the first attempt to marry the Jane Austen remake to the English dumbo film. The plot follows Pride and Prejudice rather faithfully. Hugh Grant, as Bridget’s goatish boss Daniel Cleaver, stands in for Jane Austen’s dashing reprobate Wickham; the rough-hewn-but-loaded Darcy type is the human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy (geddit?), played by Colin Firth (who played the real Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice). Bridge Jones’s Diary had the biggest-grossing opening weekend in British movie history.
But this is a film of even larger significance than its box-office take can convery: Bridget Jones’s Diary is the first movie that will cause men to recoil with the same kind of horror feminists have claimed to feel watching the sexist cinema of yore. Some critics have seen in Bridget’s craving for love and matrimony a repudiation of feminism.
Nothing could be more wrong. Bridget Jones’s Diary is laying claim to a woman’s right to the chief male right from the golden days of patriarchy: the right to be inarticulate, slovenly, lazy, drunken, disingenuous, unkind, and unimpressive — and still bag an obedient, even groveling, mate. Bridget’s cultural next-of-kin are not Jane Austen’s heroines but Dawn Powerll’s adulterous husbands, who believe they have the right to betray everyone in the service of their hedonism because . . . well, because they’re them. If this movie were called, say, Bart Jones’s Diary, it would be considered the most misogynistic film of our day.
Of course, sympathetic viewers claim to see past Bridget’s flaws to a core of integrity. One critic writes, “Everything she thinks and says is informed by a critical, clear-eyed intelligence, even if she botches the actual words.” Another marvels that, despite her dowdiness, Bridget “nevertheless manages to win, convincingly, the hearts of two breath-takingly attractive men.”
Clearly they’re thinking not of Bridget but of the fetching Renee Zellweger who plays her — and who has made her name playing put-upon women with an inner glow. Zellweger dropped her American accent and added a reported twenty pounds (more like forty, by the looks of it) for the part. But she is still recognizably herself, and she quickly dropped the weight after shooting. (Lest there be any confusion on that score, she posed in a series of slinky, clavicle-exposing gowns for Vogue.)
But Zellweger’s presence doesn’t make Bridget Jones a shrinking violet any more than John Wayne’s makes The Quiet Man a Western. Bridget is more treader upon than trodden upon. She’s snobbish (she pretends to have read F. R. Leavis). She’s disloyal (despite every evidence of Darcy’s devotion, she’s ready to drop him when the caddish Cleaver makes a drunken call). She is, above all, a plaything of her appetites. Bad character would be an improvement, might give her a bit of “Blues in the Night” sex appeal. But she has no character at all.
Certain female viewers react to Bridget Jones with that combination of self aggrandizement and self-pity that is a tell-tale of chauvinism. According to director Maguire, “People would come up to Helen all the time and say, ‘I’ve read your Bridget Jones pieces and that is me; that is my life.'” The reaction of male viewers will be dumb incomprehension at Darcy’s and (to a lesser extent) Cleaver’s willingness to prostrate themselves. When Cleaver comes back to Bridget, staggering up the stairs to interrupt her birthday party, you think: Turn around! Go back to that American babe you were dating! When Darcy appears to be contemplating marriage, you want to shout: Don’t do it, man! Eight months with her, and you’ll need a human rights lawyer!
Pride and Prejudice, needless to say, leaves other feelings. The reader roots for the lovers and rages against the class system that keeps them apart. The English and Americans have always seen different things in Jane Austen’s books, and it’s likely that difference was carried over to their screen adaptations. English viewers recognized that Darcy had a hundred good reasons to forget about Elizabeth Bennet, and that it took mighty resources of intelligence and compatibility to steel them to flout class rules. Americans wouldn’t recognize a class narrative if it punched them in the nose, and so view Austen’s conflict as the more pedestrian one of overcoming generic “inhibitions” — as Footloose or Sister Act in period dress. Each culture sees the movie it wants to see.
Class is altogether absent in Bridget Jones’s Diary, except for Bridget’s unnecessary mortification when her mother winds up dating a shopping-channel salesman. And this absence is evidence that the American reading of Jane Austen — Live a little! Don’t be so stuck up! — is drowning out the older, more English reading in England as well. Certainly, this movie’s moral compass is that everything will come right in the end if you just loosen up. That’s why two hours in a theater with Bridget Jones can leave one with bilious and unwelcome thoughts — such as that, while Pride and Prejudice is about a world that has a class system and shouldn’t, Bridget Jones’s Diary is about a world that doesn’t have one and should.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
