Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) Retrospective: More Than a Caricature

This week we're curling up with a film that, we believe, has been misread by its own trailers for twenty-five years. Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), directed by Sharon Maguire, written by Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davies, and starring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant is not, it turns out, a film about a clumsy woman falling into love. It's a film about a woman falling into herself. We revisit Bridget's diary entries, her Chardonnay budget, and her genuinely iconic fireman's pole moment with fresh eyes and find something we didn't expect: a protagonist who owns her mistakes with more dignity than most films afford their leading men. Along the way, we look at the slow-burn case for Mark Darcy, the sexiest fight scene not involving a hammer, and why "I like you just as you are" hits harder at the end than it would have at the beginning. We also run the film through the Stitch Count (the Castellini test, Gaze and Inclusivity, and the Tremors Gold Standard) and come out the other side with 5 out of 9 stitches holding it all together. Tighter than you'd think, but perhaps looser than it should be. This one's dedicated to one of our listeners, Nicole. Happy birthday! Music by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/pianocafe_kumi-35185506/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=370804">pianocafe_Kumi</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/music//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=370804">Pixabay</a>