The Edge of Treason
A week after seeing Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains, save some scribblings in my notebook. This woeful, forgettable sequel to a beloved relic among singletons and smug marrieds — for whom book and movie play like holy scripture — has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.
It would be inaccurate to call this an adaptation of Helen Fielding’s 1999 best seller; mutilation is more like it, since this version is bereft of the wit, charm, insight and politics of the book. With its catalog of pop-culture signposts — Tony Blair, Teletubbies, impossibly titled self-help books, Thelma and Louise, Nick Hornby, Oprah Winfrey — the novel at least had the feeling of being written by someone who lives in the real world. The movie, written in part by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually) and Andrew Davies, who contributed to the 2001 original, refers only to itself and its progenitor. The whole enterprise is vacuum-sealed, a place in which no one can breathe, much less utter a line of dialogue that feels genuine, emotional or honest. That’s a crime, because The Edge of Reason is a far darker, meatier and funnier book than its adored predecessor.
Director Beeban Kidron, whose movies (Used People, Swept From the Sea) have always felt like bland sitcoms, and the screenwriters (Fielding among them) seem to believe movie audiences cannot (or will not) endure the complexities and ambiguities of print, so they have excised all the interesting bits contained in the book and amplified all the dimmer ones. Instead, the movie emphasizes slapstick over satire and renders a clumsy woman more than a little dumb. Bridget, again played by Renée Zellweger, with 20 added pounds that were surely shed before the film was even edited, isn’t even very likable this time. The screenwriters have stripped her of charm, of the combustible concoction of confidence tinged with ungainliness that made her a relatable, sympathetic heroine. Here she is merely self-destructive, sabotaging her relationship with Mark the way a schoolgirl would.
But The Edge of Reason has one upside: more Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver, who surfaces as a globetrotting reporter for the same network that employs Bridget as its clown princess of journalism. (Early on, she parachutes out of a plane and lands directly in a pen of pig shit, which is but one of countless insults piled upon Bridget throughout a movie that seems determined to make her look more hopeless than hapless.) Grant gets the best lines and makes them seem more authentic. He asks Bridget if she’s wed Mark. “You know what a fan I am of any woman married to Mark Darcy,” he says.
What made Bridget Jones’s Diary so appealing was that it felt a wee bit authentic; the very audiences who adored it did so because they recognized a bit of Bridget in themselves, the lack of willpower and self-control commingling with the desire to sex it up and work it out. But The Edge of Reason is too daft and dim to register. Or at least that’s what it says in my notebook; damned if I remember any of it.
