I love Bridget Jones. Unashamedly, completely, just as she is. And I almost loved Bridget Jones’ Baby just as it was — save for one major issue.
(And no, it wasn’t that the movie accidentally swapped the personalities of Shazzer and Jude, although, “come the f– on” Sharon Maguire — Shazzer was based on you!)
This article contains spoilers for Bridget Jones’ Baby.
I got to see Bridget Jones’ Baby at an early screening, which was unexpectedly torturous. Because even though the Jones franchise isn’t exactly spoiler-heavy, it obviously wouldn’t do to spill on who she ultimately ends up with — and I was just dying to talk about the ending! Which was amazing! And I’m so happy!
…But I’m not gonna talk about Mark Fitzwilliam (!) Darcy and Bridget Jones’ too-long-awaited nuptials, nor the adorable baby reveal, nor Darcy’s romantic rival the Manic Pixie McDreamboy.
I’m going to talk about work. Bridget’s work, specifically. Because while Bridget Jones is ultimately a romance, and Bridget’s own happy ending has always revolved around finding a man (and hey, you do you, Bridge), the trilogy has in equal parts been about her establishing a career — and, in so doing, finding a confidence that doesn’t hinge on her relationships with other people, and experiencing legitimate personal success based on her professional abilities and accomplishments.
I didn’t actually want to see Bridget end up as a successful single mother (even if her own mother would have been aggressively okay with it), because that’s not what she wanted for herself; she wanted her Prince Charming and she certainly got him, and I loved that.
But I didn’t love how, once that happy ending came around, her career storyline was completely dropped as though it never existed — as though, once she ‘got her man,’ whatever career she had was no longer relevant to her life or identity.
Before we get there, however, let’s backtrack a little and evaluate how far Bridget had come by the time Bridget Jones’ Baby begins, and what events led to her happy — but incomplete — ending.
At the beginning of the movie, all of Bridget’s friends from her single-years have settled down, with half a dozen kids each, not one divorcee among them. (And, impressively, the mid-40s crowd is full of babies. The age positivity in this movie is actually fantastic.)
To my slight regret, the friends serve no purpose in the narrative except to show where Bridget wants to go, and has not yet gone – but that’s okay. That’s Bridget Jones. That’s the fantasy we buy into when we go see a movie about a woman who branded herself a ‘spinster’ at the age of 33 and whose sole purpose in life is to find Mister Right.
And, although the Bridget we meet in Baby is refreshingly more mature, owning the spinster label (even proclaiming herself a SPILF, which made me laugh a lot) and being legitimately proud of all she has accomplished, she still wants all the same things she wanted in the first movie: To meet the right guy. To fall in love. To have kids and settle down. Usually in romantic comedies this narratives bores and disappoints me, but in Bridget Jones’ case, it works. It’s who she is, but it’s not all she is.
At the outset, one of the most satisfying aspects of Bridget Jones’ Baby is that Bridget is, finally, winning at life. A lot of the humor in the previous two films (especially Diary) came from her professional misadventures, and – while, importantly, she has never been presented as incompetent – it was refreshing to see her having risen through the ranks within the TV studio she works, with colleagues that like and respect her, and a general flair for doing her job well.
She still makes mistakes, more on that in a bit, but Bridget was for all intents and purposes an empowered character, and we weren’t laughing at her nearly as much as with her — another refreshing aspect of the Bridget Jones saga, as most rom-coms will force you to view the female lead in a condescending light. This is Bridget’s story, and she owns it.
But then she gets fired. The new and hip management (led by the hilariously annoying Kate O’Flynn) come in to make changes, and witness a series of genuinely brand-damaging mistakes (and, honestly, most people would have been fired after the first) that lead to them eventually firing her — in her ninth! month! of! pregnancy.
Already here, it gets a little uncomfortable. Not so much because she makes mistakes, or even because she gets fired for them. The problem is the implication that Bridget only makes mistakes because she’s pregnant. While we don’t see much of Bridget pre-pregnancy, we can assume that she hasn’t risen to the top by making career-ending mistakes. Yet as soon as she finds out she’s expecting, she launches into a series of strange misadventures, the last instance (mistaking a general for his driver) evidently a clear case of ‘pregnancy brain’ causing her to lose focus.
Not only should she not have been working two weeks before her due date (is this a thing in Britain? And, if it is: What the fuck, Britain?), but having her repeatedly mess up as a result of her pregnancy unfortunately makes it look like the movie is insinuating that pregnant women aren’t capable of doing their job, and deserve to get fired as a result.
Especially because Bridget isn’t the only pregnant lady who meets this fate: We hear about only one other person being fired by the new management, and that’s an unnamed woman who was in her sixth month of pregnancy.
But okay, new management sucks, and Bridget is fired; it’s just one of many catastrophes she brings upon herself to literally land herself in the dumps, in order for her Mr Right to swoop in and be the knight she always wanted. That’s fine – great, even – once again feeding into the fantasy of Bridget Jones, satisfying in the context of her three-movie arc.
I could accept and dismiss her professional failures, and I did, except for one major problem: We never get a resolution to this part of Bridget’s story. At the top of the movie, her job was her identity. At the finish line she has a baby and the happy ending she always wanted, and we see her genuinely content. But there is not one line about her finding another job (or about her suing the company, since, you know, her being fired probably directly caused her to go into early labor and stuff).
Bridget certainly didn’t spare her professional career a single thought in the final scene, and honestly, neither did I. It wasn’t until I was on my way home, thinking about all the hilarity and cute make-out scenes, that it suddenly struck me: This huge part of her story had no wrap-up whatsoever. After the birth of her baby there is nothing but diffuse, nonspecific happiness, as though everything that wasn’t part of her fairytale ending had evaporated into thin air, becoming irrelevant the second she was ‘a mum.’
For the most part, I’m willing to buy into Bridget’s story completely. She may not want what I want, and we are not very much alike at all, but there is more than one way to be a woman, and more than one way to get a ‘happy ending,’ as it were. Bridget wants marriage and babies and that’s what she gets.
But one of the key parts of Bridget Jones, and arguably the thing that makes this movie series genuinely enjoyable as more than your average, vapid rom-com, is that Bridget is more than that. The men in her life famously love her ‘just as she is,’ and she is so much more than her own limited fantasies. That’s kind of the whole point of the story.
Ending on a note of pure happiness is, truly, satisfying. But there was absolutely no need to erase everything else Bridget had built up for herself, including the career we’ve seen her fight tooth and nail for for the better part of three films. There’s no reason Bridget couldn’t ~have it all~, for lack of a better expression; there’s no reason why this modern woman that she was on her way to becoming – a single, successful working mother – had to be erased from existence once the romantic part of her story worked out.
Suddenly the ending isn’t as unequivocally cute and romantic as it seems, because there’s something troubling in the notion that the life Bridget had built for herself was only a placeholder, second-best to the fairytale happy ending women have been taught for centuries that they must aspire towards. And I would argue that, for as much cheesy romance as Bridget Jones imbues in its heroine, this message isn’t in the spirit of the series at all.
All we needed was one scene wrapping up the professional arm of her story (other than Bridget’s newscaster friend declaring her labor on national TV, um what?), one line that may very well have been in there at one point but ended up being cut for time, confirming that Bridget had amounted to more than wife/mother, that she was still her, ‘just as she is,’ the Bridget Jones we all fell in love with.
It is likely unintentional from director Sharon Maguire, but it nonetheless remains a glaring flaw in an otherwise delightful, life- and love-affirming movie.