Erin: Movies brought us together before we were actually friends, and certainly before Bridget Jones was part of the equation. In a course on classical film theory during our sophomore year, Laine and I shared such viewing experiences as “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” and “Beau Travail” before we exchanged any words. Laine disappeared from the class before she fully registered in my mind as a human being, and I started to wonder if she had been a figment of my imagination, intimidating me with her sharp eyeliner wings, until I joined The Michigan Daily’s Arts section a month later and found her there.
As I have written about before, I assumed that when we re-met we would not be friends. Once we were friends, I would never have guessed that the film most central to our friendship — the film that in part, I think, created that friendship — was one anyone who called themselves a film snob would probably frown at. Maybe because my only context for her was a somewhat pretentious film class.
Laine: Erin and I watched “Bridget Jones’s Diary” for the first time at the end of 2022. It was both a pivotal viewing for my Letterboxd account and for our friendship. Erin stayed with me for a short stretch of days before finishing her winter break at home with her family. Having multiple sleepovers at your parent’s house feels strange and different when you’re an adult in college. We responded to this strangeness with Bridget Jones, giggling over the solemn expression with which Mark Darcy (the type-cast-as-Darcys Colin Firth, “A Single Man”) expressed happiness, cringing at the specific political in-correctness of the ’90s and reeling over Bridget’s catastrophic public speaking fumbles (His name is Mr. Fitzherbert, not Mr. Titspervert, Bridget).
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Erin and Laine: Kafka’s motorbike. The most ingenious fictional book title in any film. What does it mean? If it’s “the greatest book of our time,” as the posters claim, why are we never given more information? Furthermore, why are Hugh Grant (“Wonka”) and Firth wrestling atop a plate of spanakopita in the film’s climax, and where did Bridget acquire such a giant pair of underpants?
These were the questions we asked during “Bridget Jones’s Diary” the first time, and maybe that’s indicative of this movie’s brilliance: Even a throwaway line can be the best thing you have heard in cinema all month. We adopted Kafka’s Motorbike as our own inside joke, one we didn’t make up but experienced together and, OK, maybe stole from Bridget. Even when the jokes were in poor taste, which they usually were, and the datedness became apparent, which it did in nearly every scene, they were part of its appeal as a film capable of creating friendship. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it; it was something we had to learn to love and interpret, and that’s the sort of experience you can’t help but leave feeling more bonded. Our conclusions? “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is so stupid but it’s also so brilliant. The stupidity is part of its brilliance.
Almost nothing in the world of Bridget Jones can be called “realistic,” and a lot of it can’t be called “well-made,” but the way the films, especially “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” deal with friendship is both. In so many romcoms, the main character has, at most, two friends — that’s generous, it’s usually one — and those one to two friends exist as a “voice of reason” for the main character. They are a stand-in for the audience to talk down to the main character or a human wall at which the main character can vent her frustrations and leave before the friends can reveal any part of their lives outside a friendship that feels like it was contractually agreed upon.
Bridget has a friend group, and their problems are just as important as hers. She tells them about embarrassing herself in front of Grant — sorry, I mean Daniel Cleaver — and being unsure whether to choose him or Mark Darcy. Her friends have lives of their own, too, and they are given space in the story. Bridget comforts Jude (Shirley Henderson, “The House Across the Street”) on the phone when facing boyfriend troubles. Another sequence shows her friend Tom’s (James Callis, “Austenland”) interaction with a couple in a restaurant who he assumes have bothered him because they recognized him as a low-level celebrity, but it turns out they have no idea who he is and that his chair leg was sitting on the woman’s coat. Even her third friend, Shazzer (Sally Philips, “How to Please a Woman”), is at least given some personality as a journalist whose favorite word is fuck.
Friendship is inherent to the film even in its now-antagonist, competing love interests. Darcy and Cleaver — mortal enemies with a stained past — were best friends once. The “big reveal” is that Cleaver slept with Darcy’s fiancee, but the betrayal of their friendship is portrayed as the most damning part of Cleaver’s character, despite the red flags apparent in his relationship with Bridget.
Perhaps because of the film’s distant basis on “Pride and Prejudice,” whose central relationship is arguably the friendship between Lizzie and her sister Jane, the film underscores friendship as the one thing that deserves true care and sincerity — a gravity it doesn’t extend to romantic love. Friendship conquers all — it’s the devotion to this theme that lets us forgive the film for all its faults and call it great.
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Erin: Since that fateful night on Laine’s basement floor when we first turned to each other in awe as Grant and Firth flew (in slow motion) through a window while “It’s Raining Men” played, we haven’t been able to shake the movie’s hold on our consciousness.
After I returned to Ann Arbor from Spring Break in March of 2023, I went to Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea. Between the end of the break and the return to classes, I was feeling alone and unsettled. I wanted to be out of my apartment, but I didn’t want to pay for anything, and this was the nearest place where these conflicting needs led me. Shortly after I got there, Laine texted me. I hadn’t known if she was back from break yet. She asked if I wanted to watch the other two Bridget Jones movies, and before I even texted her back, I felt a sense of relief. I would be with a friend, returning to our unexpectedly favorite character, and that made the world feel small and safe again. The only reason I liked watching these lesser Bridget Jones movies — and much less forgivable, “The Edge of Reason” for racism and homophobia and “Bridget Jones’s Baby” for the perhaps less serious crime of killing off Grant’s character in the first five minutes — was because it was with Laine. The first movie shaped our friendship; this time, our existing friendship shaped the experience of watching the movie and gave it a significance it objectively didn’t earn.
Laine: Bridget talks to the audience the same way she talks to her close friends — revealing statistics about herself that feel too personal, including the cumulative number of cigarettes she’s puffed and the frequency of her alcohol consumption. She lets us into her circle of friendship, and Erin and I bond over our shared closeness with Bridget. I’m sure we’ll be watching the franchise again before we both move to faraway places, fossilizing Bridget Jones as a symbol of our friendship.
The last time we saw each other over this past Winter Break was over dinner and a special screening of “Bridget Jones’s Diary” at the Michigan Theater. Except this time, we knew exactly what we were in for, and we excitedly jumped at the opportunity. Our Bridget Jones victory lap felt especially sweet.
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans and Daily Arts Writer Laine Brotherton can be reached at erinev@umich.edu and laineb@umich.edu.