Bridget Jones's Baby

Renée's Anatomy

Bridget Jones’s Baby

Grade: B

Director: Sharon Maguire

Starring: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey and Emma Thompson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 2 min.

Bookended by a funeral and a wedding, Bridget Jones’s Baby feels like the direct sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary that The Edge of Reason impersonated. Indeed, a late-film flashback chronicling the arc of Bridget (Renée Zellweger) and stodgy “Mawk Dawcy” (Colin Firth) contains no clips from the series’ second film.

Clocking in at just over two hours, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t adopt the sharp efficiency of Diary. Fortunately, with the return of Diary director Sharon Maguire and an dedicated cast, Baby does replicate the original’s ribald charm and chemistry.

Released 15 years after Diary, Baby retunes its protagonists from 20-something Gen Xers looking for romance to 40-somethings in search of parenthood. Bridget and Mark open the film at the funeral of scalawag Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, who appears via photo only), the casualty of a mysterious plane crash. Mark is accompanied by Camilla, while Bridget is married only to the wine she imbibes alone that evening for her 43rd birthday.

Bridget and TV anchor gal pal Miranda (Sarah Solemani) go on a weekend of drunken glamping, where Bridget climbs into the yurt of Jack Qwant (Jack Dempsey), a hunky American mogul who has patented an online matchmaking algorithm, a needless plot appendage. Several days after Bridget and Jack shag, Bridget and Mark cross paths again at a christening, where Mark reveals that he’s separated from Camilla. Of course they also end up between the sheets, and a few weeks later Bridget discovers she’s pregnant with uncertain paternity.

Surprisingly, and most welcome, is the fact that both Darcy and McDreamy want to be father and neither are perturbed at Bridget about the predicament. Still, the rest of Bridget Jones’s Baby is the rather predictable course of miscommunications, male posturing and mishaps, culminating with the requisite race to the hospital. There’s about 20 minutes of padding, enlivened mainly by the rapier Brit wit of Emma Thompson, who’s not given nearly enough screen time as Bridget’s droll obstetrician.

The script’s jokes span the spectrum form timely to dated. Bridget’s newsroom is co-opted by new hipster owners sporting beards and man-buns, whose desire to outsource newsgathering to citizens and their camera phones meets with risqué results. On the other hand, the only thing Mark knows about “Gangnam Style” is that it’s a suburb of Seoul, an admittedly amusing payoff to a musty setup.

Otherwise, Bridget Jones’s Baby is a cozy reprise with enough callbacks for fans of the original: Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis return as Bridget’s buddies; Bridget's daft parents (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent); even the layout of Bridget’s flat. But it’s the somehow-it-works rapport between Zellweger and Firth that forms the film’s heart and sates the audience’s sense of nostalgia.

Leatherheads

Renée Zellweger in "The Sarah Larson Story"

Grade: C +
Director: George Clooney
Starring: George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, and Stephen Root
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Having learned at the feet of his sometimes filmmaking partner Stephen Soderbergh and their genre throwbacks The Good German, Solaris, and the Ocean’s series, George Clooney the director now revives his third American decade in three films with Leatherheads. The failing Clooney takes from his years of Soderbergh schooling is a penchant for replicating a particular Hollywood era, not a particular historical era.

Set in the roaring 1920s, Leatherheads revisits the nascent epoch of professional American football, when college teams played in stadiums filled with thousands of rapid fans while their pro counterparts practiced in cow pastures with rosters comprised of drunken louts and out-of-work blue collar laborers. In order to revive the near-defunct Duluth Bulldogs, their aging star, Dodge Connelly (Clooney), entices the top college star, Princeton’s Carter “Bullet” Rutherford (James Krasinski), to leave school and join the Bulldogs in exchange for a lucrative payday.

This is the sort of movie-by-numbers in which the soused beat reporter is named Suds and Renée Zellweger can only squint bit, purse her lips, and channel Roxie Hart, this time under the guise of a sassy newspaper journalist named Lexie Littleton. Lexie is tapped to unearth the less glamorous truth behind Carter’s war hero background, but in so doing she bedazzles both Carter and Dodge.

Leatherheads was filmed throughout North and South Carolina, especially the Salisbury and Winston-Salem areas, and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel illuminates the locales with a soft glow and vivid palette of yesteryear. In that same vein, Clooney tries to replicate the staccato repartee found in the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and George Cukor: with its batty love triangle, think a gridiron version of The Philadelphia Story. However, this ain't Cary & Kate - this is the sort of blindly carefree confection where Carter and Dodge can pummel each other in the face for a half-hour without either suffering even a scratch, while two smooches with Lexie leaves lipstick smeared across Dodge’s entire mouth.

As in Irreconcilable Differences (and, increasingly, everything else he does), Clooney again emulates a breezy Cary Grant, except this time by way of Everett from O Brother, Where Art Thou? As the amiable, hunky Carter, Krasinski comes off like a holdover silent-movie actor struggling with the transition to talkies. And, Zellweger is just there as the Girl Friday, unblessed with a script not sharp enough to compete with Clooney’s resplendent personality.

A subtext celebrating the bygone era of pure, hardscrabble sports before it became infected by “rules” and other superfluous influences – epitomized here by a super-agent played by Jonathan Pryce – falls flat. Like the two teams competing in the climactic big game, Leatherheads remains stuck in the mud.

Neil Morris