Bridget Jones is one of our most beloved pop culture feminist icons. For the past 20 plus years, we have watched her wrestle with romantic love, stumbling, fumbling and improvising her way through awkward job interviews, foreign prisons and one night stands.
All the while, she has maintained loyally attached to her own sense of self — that of a deeply flawed, insecure, authentic and wildly resilient human being. In the beginning of the fourth installment of the latest movies Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, we find Renée Zellweger once again in her state of ‘single-dom’ — a widower, this time, facing a dinner-table full of smug married couples interrogating her love life.
“Must be hard dating in your middle ages as a single woman, isn’t it?”, one male dinner party guest inquires. Twenty five years ago, she was being asked with the same level of intense scrutiny, “Why is it there are so many unmarried women in their thirties these days, Bridget?” — as if she were meant to have an anthropological answer to a woman’s absence of a romantic companion, a status which has always made society bristle with discomfort.
When I was single at 24, an elderly woman at a social gathering asked me with bewildered shock why I didn’t have a boyfriend, as if there were something fundamentally wrong with me.
Never mind the real reason to that rude party guest’s question to Bridget two decades ago, which is that more women are refusing to settle for mediocre heterosexual partnerships, and the fact that there are just so few straight, genuinely feminist men. Bridget’s relatability is perhaps the main reason for her enduring charm.
In Mad about a Boy, she is no longer is drinking like a fish or smoking like a chimney but she’s still unapologetically herself, in the way she walks, the way she carries herself, the way she dresses (I almost leap with joy upon seeing the return of her grey hooded, belted coat) and the way she leaves the house with her hair looking the way it does —that of a normal, busy, working mother of two. Projected on the huge cinema screens, one might call it ‘messy’—only because all the other women have hair that’s been combed, styled, waxed and straightened to appear magazine (or movie) ready. But the decision to leave her hair a little bit dishevelled (even on the mornings she hasn’t had a shag with her newest romantic tryst) was a small yet significant detail I latched onto while watching the latest movie.
She was, in 2001, the most relatable rom com heroine, and she retains that merit in 2025 despite being emblematic of the typical rom com heroine that movies are made about—white, cis-hetro, middle class, skinny and attractive women.
She has a posse of strong friends whom return in this latest installment, played by the same actors from the first movie — Shazza (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (James Callis) — their return marking the truth of the old adage, lovers will come and go, but friends remain forever. But let’s not skip over the obvious appeal of the latest movie—the two male romantic leads—played by Leo Woodall (“One Day”, “The White Lotus” S2) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”, “Children of Men”, he was also Keira Knightly’s husband in “Love Actually“).
The appallingly attractive Woodall is put to good use, with the camera ogling at his puppy-dog eyes and t-shirt biceps. Playing a 29-year old part-time park-ranger studying the science of garbage disposal, he is effortlessly charming, sweet and sexy. He tells our heroine he prefers older women because of their emotional maturity. He wins the hearts of Bridget’s friends, even saving a colleague’s dog from a pool in a drooling homage to a Levi’s commercial from 1992, though watching it, I was only thinking of the Lake Scene from BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1995). There is something carnally irresistible about a drenched man emerging from a body of water, half-dressed — and Woodall’s sturdy pectorals get their much warranted fifteen seconds of fame under a perfectly loose creamy white shirt.
There’s eye-candy to be savoured too with our other romantic lead, Mr Wallaker (played by Ejiofor) who is presented as the logic-loving science teacher of Bridget’s son, William. Initially, Mr Wallaker appears uptight, and perhaps a little authoritarian even, but eventually, we learn that he sees magic in the everyday miracles of the natural world. He is a stable, kind-hearted complement to Bridget’s sombre, grief-filled days. Which brings me to the most unexpected yet poignant note of this latest movie—it is incredibly and utterly sad. It’s a multiple-instance tear jerker. My face was wet throughout several scenes, and in the cinema, I was surrounded by couples where the women were clinging to their partners, sniffing loudly. Be prepared to cry — the movie does not shy away from portraying Bridget’s grief over losing her beloved husband. It’s been four years since his untimely death but the pain is still piercing.
Her sorrow and grief do not overwhelm the movie. Despite these melancholic moments, Bridget’s spirit continues to soar. On her way to her son’s Parent Teacher Interview night, Bridget says something like — “there is nothing worse than attending Parent Teacher evenings, especially when you’re a single parent.” Any normal human would perhaps wallow in self pity, but not Bridget. She lifts her chin up and smiles and says something to the lines of: “Nevertheless, I will soldier on!”
That’s the sort of person we all aspire to be, is it not? Someone who will keep on living in the hopes of a brighter tomorrow. That’s probably why the movie has become the best-performing romcom in the UK on opening weekend in history. The world is itching for a heroine who reflects the best of us, flaws and all. In the end, even though Bridget always ends up with a male companion at the end of each movie, we know that she is the one to save herself. She is her own hero.