For 24 years, viewers worldwide have been smitten with the lovably neurotic, hopeless romantic Bridget Jones. She’s the everywoman, a picture of klutzy mishaps of the heart that looks more like a mirror than a photograph. Even before the first entry in the film franchise, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” hit theaters in 2001, readers were so charmed by the character when she appeared in Helen Fielding’s column in The Independent that the satire didn’t completely connect. Yes, Bridget was too focused on marriage, men, calories and sex to be the perfect depiction of a modern woman looking toward liberation in the new millennium, and it was those outmoded obsessions that Fielding set out to lampoon. Yet the chronicling of Bridget’s lovelorn escapades still struck a chord in people trying to balance new modernity with the pull of romantic desire. When Fielding turned the column into a book, it was an instant fly-off-the-shelves hit.
The film series, starring Renée Zellweger in the titular role, makes Bridget’s struggle between backward ideas of feminine self-loathing and her intrepid quest for love even more palatable for the average viewer. But though they take a more standard romantic comedy approach to the character, the movies have become comfort cinema staples for countless viewers, who still see layers of themselves in Bridget’s innumerable foibles, especially as they get older. And that’s the rarity about the “Bridget Jones” films — what began as a bit of rom-com fluff transformed into an intimate record of love and loss over decades. Audiences have grown up with Bridget, aging alongside her and hitting the same benchmarks in marriage, children, death, hangovers and wrinkles. Others, like me, came to Bridget when they were far too young to be watching randy, R-rated romances, and have found themselves caught up in the same woes through the years.
