Fun in the oven

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This article was published 15/09/2016 (3471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Our Bridget is back.

This broad, bumptious rom-com starring Renée Zellweger may be predictable and familiar. But it’s predictable and familiar in a friendly get-in-your-comfy-pyjamas-and-drink-a-little-too-much-white-wine sort of way. (Which is exactly what Bridget is doing when we first see her.)

While this threequel is not as good as the 2001 original, which was irresistibly zeitgeisty, it’s better than the wobbly second. And in its silly, completely shallow way, it could be the flat-out funniest.

The storyline, penned by author Helen Fielding with Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson, departs from Fielding’s iffy third book, which is a smart idea. After a lengthy celibate season, Bridget hooks up with Jack (Patrick Dempsey, a.k.a. Grey’s Anatomy’s Dr. McDreamy), a dishy American she meets at a music festival. A few days later, she shares a tender but temporary reunion with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), her onetime love.

Three months later Bridget is up the duff, as the Brits like to say, thanks to her crappy, dolphin-friendly eco-condoms, but she doesn’t know who the father is. Initially, Mark and Jack — neither man knows about the other — each thinks the baby is his. Bridget, in her well-intentioned but totally hapless way, can’t quite bring herself to clear this up. As a plot device this seems a bit hard on the men, though it does make for some terrific comic mayhem.

Ultimately, Bridget must make a choice. Will it be her “shiny new American,” who conveniently turns out to be a billionaire mathematician who has developed an algorithm to predict true love? Or will it be Mr. Darcy?

Well, this is a swell problem for a pregnant, single, 43-year-old woman to have.

Whether one is Team Mark or Team Jack — or Team Both — director Sharon Maguire keeps the audience onside with breezy pacing and a bawdy, generous, affectionate tone.

Zellweger, who hasn’t been around much lately, reminds us of her comic chops and wonderfully warm, sympathetic screen presence. As for the other points in this romantic triangle: Dempsey as Jack is predictably dreamy, but the character of Mark Darcy is underserved by the fast and loose script. Only that fact that he’s played by Firth, who carries around with him layers of Firthy, Firthy sexiness from other performances, makes Mark seem like a real romantic prospect and not an emotionally shut-down, workaholic prig. (Maybe we need the humanizing influence of that reindeer sweater.)

There’s lots of slapstick, including the usual mad dash to the hospital after the contractions start, but we could use more of the sharp, dry wit represented by Emma Thompson, who plays Bridget’s hilariously crisp obstetrician.

And while this is not something a movie reviewer usually says, we could also use more voice-over. Bridget’s diary entries, with their characteristic mix of calorie-counting and complaining, their muddle of women’s-magazine motivational phrases and hilariously neurotic self-doubt, are actually underused.

There are subplots, including Bridget’s job as a “top television news producer.” As usual, she has stretches of professional competence cut with spectacular public screw-ups. And she’s dealing with a workplace infestation of “bearded ironic hipster” millennials and a new boss, Alice (Kate O’Flynn), who’s been “brought in to sack anyone older than she is” — which is everybody, basically. (At some point one has to wonder, is being anti-millennial the last acceptable prejudice?)

The script, which is revisiting Bridget after a gap of 12 years, has also figured out what to do with its older but not necessarily wiser heroine, in contrast to the missteps from the Ab Fab and Sex in the City franchises. Bridget isn’t aging gracefully — and we wouldn’t want her to — but she is hitting 43 in a recognizable and relatable way.

Speaking of recognizable and relatable, there is one small niggle here: Bridget is now undeniably Hollywood-sized. And yes, maybe expecting Zellweger to rapidly pack on pounds, as she did for each of the first two movies, and then even more rapidly take them off for awards season, is unfair and unworkable. But I seem to remember Bridget once telling Mr. Darcy, “Yes, I will always be just a little bit fat.”

That was, after all, one of Bridget’s chief charms: that in the face of crushing societal standards for women, she insisted on being loved just the way she is.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca