Renée Zellweger plays the beautiful Bridget Jones. Hugh Grant plays the pretentious womanizer Daniel Cleaver. Colin Firth plays sweet-hearted bore, Mark Darcy. Needless to say, "Bridget Jones's Diary" brings the typecasting idea to a whole new level.
Bridget Jones is a British woman who is working for an advertising firm as a publicist. She smokes, drinks and is slightly overweight. But Bridget is most definitely a ditz. And all these issues will erupt in her naive face when she meets her parents for an annual Christmas party and overhears the guy with whom her mother is attempting to fix her with Mark Darcy. So Bridget decides to keep a diary and clean herself up somehow. However, this isn't helpful when she starts flirting with her annoying manager, Daniel Cleaver, over the company's email system and spends nights in his apartment a short time before.
The plotline of the film, based on Helen Fielding's highly popular novel of the same title, has the single-dimensional romantic elements most often associated with teenage garbage, albeit featuring much older characters here. There's a good guy, a bad guy, a confused protagonist, and a twist of a plot or two that ends up doing everything right. Some characters aren't even established at all, like the trio of loyal friends; Bridget seems to be the most important and unsung part of her life.
However, the film is enjoyable somehow. Popcorn goes well with lighthearted romantic flirtation, some sweet, dramatic irony and a generally delicate cast, no matter how little they do. The jokes seem to hit the mark, and the movie moves at a reasonable rate.
The reality is that, because of its simplicity, "Bridget Jones' Diary" succeeds. Such a straightforward structure with an easy-to-understand plotline as this movie has is a rarity in Hollywood today. Another Hugh Grant film, "Notting Hill," is an example of a similar system at work. And the public tends to accept such non-esoteric activities. It is not so much that we are such a stupid society that we can only pursue a good-hearted girl in search of Mr Right as she contemplates her two most obvious choices, but rather that the films remain a senseless escape for many. That is precisely what "Diary of Bridget Jones" is, a mindless escape. Also, it is a perfect date movie.
