Month: April 2001

Wednesday, April 18, 2001

What are the hallmarks of an English person? Ask the English and they might say a stiff upper lip, a sense of fair play and a gutsy determination to get the job done. Ask other people from around the world, and you might get hypocrisy, bad food and imperialism. (Here, in the interests of full disclosure I must tell you that I was born and raised in England, but I’m feeling much better now).

But as the film version of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ shows us, the real attributes that describe the nation are embarrassment, understatement and friendship.

The film is less a slavish representation of Helen Fielding’s book and more the conclusion to Richard Curtis’ loose trilogy that started with ‘Four Weddings’ and ‘Notting Hill’. Essentially the same premise is observed in all three films – a good-hearted, slightly clumsy, rather under-confident main character gets put through the mill of love before living happily ever.

Let’s look at those attributes – first, embarrassment: as a people, the English are hyper-sensitive about appearances and hate standing out – it’s just so undignified. (On the other hand, there’s something so liberating about just doing what you want to, and not giving a shit, which is one of the many reasons that English people have a grudging but definite respect for the Irish).

So Bridget spends most of the film being mortified in various ways. It’s bad enough that she has to dress up in the outfit her Mum has laid out for her, but it’s so much worse when she overhears Mark Darcy slagging her off, since the rules say that everyone has to try hard to avoid embarrassing everyone else – so even if someone is wearing curtains, it’s very bad form to mention it.

Then she turns up to a garden party dressed as a bunny girl, when everyone else is in civvies, and later reveals her shapely backside to the world while sliding down a fireman’s pole.

But it’s not just Bridget who suffers from this. In the most convincing fight scene I’ve seen in ages (compare and contrast with the Nietzschean self-belief of ‘Fight Club’), the two leading men apologise profusely to disrupted diners as they tumble across their tables during a brawl. You also get the sense that being thrown through a window actually hurts.

Of course, if you’re afraid of being embarrassed all the time, the you’re automatically very suspicious of love because it makes you do stupid things. Which is where understatement comes in, offering a roundabout route to avoid saying anything so clumsy as ‘I love you’. As Anthony Lane in the New Yorker points out, when Colin Firth says, ‘I like you very much,’ that’s ‘Englishman’s code for uncontrollable lust’.

And even getting that out of him is a real effort – it’s not that he doesn’t have the feelings (Colin Firth is excellent at showing himself suprised and uneasily amused at what he feels for Bridget), it’s just that he’s incapable of revealing its true depth.

Of course Bridget undestands this code and uses it herself, ‘If you wanted to pop by sometime, that might be nice,’ is her deepest profession of love for him.

(Of course sometimes this understatement is entirely appropriate. For example, when it allows for one of the few good anal sex jokes in modern cinema.)

The final characteristic on display in buckets in ‘Bridget Jones’ is friendship. Richard Curtis has a very good line in sketching in a set of supportive and understanding friends, who are always there to give advice, and act like a Greek chorus in the proceedings. If you’re constantly embarrassing yourself, and can’t quite say what you mean when it matters, then you certainly need a good set of friends who don’t care about any of that, and will love you even when you serve them blue soup.

So apart from a few missteps – like the excessive use of fake snow in the climactic scenes, the film is a success. Rene? Zellweger masters the same middle class South East accent that Gwywneth Paltrow aced in ‘Sliding Doors’, Hugh Grant shows that he can convincingly cross over to the dark side and use his charm and floppy hair for evil, while Colin Firth reprises his stern but upright Mr Darcy role from the TV version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. He even has the big house (but we didn’t get to see if he’s got a lake round the back).

Of course, Colin Firth’s character in ‘Bridget Jones’ being called Mr Darcy is no accident. Not only did Andrew Davies share screenwriting credits on both projects, there’s another Jane Austen reference thrown in, when Bridget remarks at one point, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged . . . ‘

This depiction of English life, with embarrassment, understatement and friendship playing crucial roles is as much a part of Jane Austen’s world as it is modern London, and seen in this way Bridget Jones comes across as quite old fashioned. 

The rigid set of acceptable social behaviours and expectations that power the humour in ‘Bridget Jones’ is a world away from the good-natured anarchy of ‘Teachers’ or ‘Spaced’, for example. And while it’s only a certain type of modern Englishman who would wear a reindeer jumper with the same degree of pained perserverance shown by Colin Firth, the world would be worse off without them.