Bridget Jones is no feminist

Bridget Jones isn’t what she used to be. The latest film, Mad About the Boy, features Bridget as a grieving widow with kids. It’s a sad departure from the Bridget of the 1990s, with her festive jumper, short skirts and saucy moments with Daniel Cleaver.

I was 14 and Bridget Jones hit every note I wanted

Mad About the Boy, which came out on Thursday, has already been raved about, slathered over and lauded. It’s certain to make a fortune at the box office. But I’ve always found the films’ success rather puzzling. Bridget will always be text first and foremost – not film – to original true believers who, like me, devoured Helen Fielding’s first instalment on publication in 1996. I was 14 and it hit absolutely every note I wanted: romance, sex, unrequited love, an unbelievable ability to muddle through despite being incompetent, friends, career and the perennial favourite of women young and old: failed diets. 

The book on which the latest film is based lacked the zing of the original. Yet the frenzy surrounding the release of Mad About the Boy suggests that this latest instalment in the franchise should bring us all joy, and inject that heady mix of fun, romance and feminism into a dank, dreary and lingering winter. We’ll see.

Perhaps the film version of Mad About the Boy does fill in the magic the prose in that book lacked. If so, it marks an interesting switcheroo from the time when the book, rather than the blockbuster, was best. The truth is that the film versions of Bridget have struggled to even remotely capture the witty, listy, vernacular zing of the book. As for the casting, how cringingly strange that Bridget with her true-blue, off-centre, bumbling but secretly ironclad Englishness is played by Renee Zellweger, an American actress who had to mainline donuts in order to look plausible.

Commercially, however, Zellweger seems to have been a great choice: the franchise has already made $800 million (£650 million) worldwide, in three films released over 24 years (the first film came out in 2001). There is something irresistible about Bridget, therefore, that carries from the page to the screen. And with this latest film, the evocation of an everywoman in her 50s coping with grief with two children in tow, has hit a nerve. It is so real, so emotional, so sad, yet so happy! And so on. The wheel of life spins, even in Bridget Jones’ cute house.

But let us not mistake, as some have, the warts-and-all authenticity of Bridget, in book or film form, for feminism. She is the ultimate example of someone who fails upward, largely for being adorable. This works in her romantic life: Darcy is rich, Oxbridge and generous, and she snags him by being an accident-prone little-old-me. Something similar happens in her work in TV, where chance and misunderstanding keep resulting in opportunities that Bridget finds deeply embarrassing until she becomes successful. In her first outing, she may have been an indebted ingenue who wouldn’t know discipline or ambition if it broke one of her chardonnay glasses, but she still managed to live in a nice cosy flat in central London that most thirty-somethings would kill for.

In short, Bridget is incompetent, unambitious and incredibly lucky, which somewhat detracts from her feminist image. Her quest is with herself, a now-trite truism of modern heroes and heroines. As Amelia Granger, head of Working Title films, who has worked across the film franchise, puts it: ‘What Bridget has always been seeking is self-love and self-acceptance.’ 

Snore. Indeed, if, like me, you want your ‘feminist’ women to combat adversity with ingenuity, or just graft, to get to the top of their tree of choice, then Bridget isn’t even in the same universe as other feminist heroines. 

But if, also like me, you just want to sit back and watch sexy, cutesy, surprising love bloom between gorgeous film stars, then Bridget, even in Mad About the Boy, ticks enough boxes to make it worth seeing. Just don’t delude yourself that because of her advancing years and hot young man this is an empowering watch. It isn’t. But it is a nostalgic one.

Bridget is the last vanguard of an old world in which charm, happenstance and an aura of cute chaos shapes outcomes and, rather than derail them, seems to guarantee that, in the end, all will be right in the world – Bridget’s world, that is.