May 11, 2001 01:06 AM
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I once read a dispatch from a Britney Spears concert in which the writer, after noting that the performer failed to sing, dance or lip-sync adequately, theorized that she is so popular because she sends the message that it is okay to be mediocre. Never mind that you have no talent dear: Neither does our Britney, and she makes out just fine.
Add 15 years, a university diploma and a British accent and you are fairly close to the Bridget Jones of Bridget Jones' Diary, based on Helen Fielding's best-seller. Bridget (Renee Zellweger) can't seem to do anything right. She is comically inarticulate at crucial moments, either saying what ever pops into her head or else chirping out helpless non sequiturs. She can't stick to her resolutions, whether made at New Year's Eve or mid-year, and so she begins obsessively diarizing her weight along with her cigarette and alcohol consumption, as though they were barometric readings of her psyche, and chronicling the loud crashes that conclude all her relationships with men.
''I already feel like an idiot most of the time anyway,'' Bridget admits. You sympathize, if only because she is played by Zellweger, who is little and cute and alert as a sparrow, with a smile that could charm the blue out of the sky.
In the first reel she meets a divorcee her mom sets her up with, a tight lipped and saturnine human rights barrister named Mark (Colin Firth) who grates on her so badly that they're surely destined for each other; she also falls for her playboy publishing-house boss, Daniel (Hugh Grant).
We know Daniel is not good enough for her, but as played by a floppy haired, open collared Grant he gives the film much of its spark. He is an incorrigible rake who calls Bridget ''Jones'' and is witty and cynical about everything; it might have been he who scripted Bridget's wry voice overed intros of the people in her life, or conceived of a book-party scene in which all anyone can seem to ask Salman Rushdie (played by Salman Rushdie) is, ''Where's the loo?''
The film, however, is instead co-written by novelist Fielding, Richard Curtis and Andrew Davies, and directed by Sharon Maguire has decent comic timing, but her approach is too often heavy handed, as exemplified by a soundtrack culled from the Jukebox of Cinematic Indolence: ''All By Myself,'' ''Respect,'' ''Peter Gunn''-even ''It's Raining Men'' and ''Ain't No Mountain High Enough,'' only one or two of them used with even a hit of irony.
Moreover, the film's generally merry irreverence does not survive its first half, which ends roughly with Daniel cheating on Bridget with a lithe Yankee co-worker. ''I will not be defeated by a bad man and an American stick insect,'' Bridget pluckily writes in her diary, and resolves to get on without men.
But we know she won't, can't in fact, because Fielding and Maguire have already set the post-feminist terms of this battle of the sexes in which Bridget, a needy, beleaguered combatant, always has the lower hand. Her entire sense of self-worth comes via the approval of men. Even her big career break arrives despite-in fact, because of-her thoroughly unprofessional behavior. If this is supposed to make her heroically average, God help the modern woman.
