I wrote recently about Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (”Juxtaposition Review: Bridget Jones’s Diary and Children of Men“) and after reading the book I didn’t think I would enjoy the movie adaptation of Bridget Jones at all, so I put off watching it, with no real plans to do so.
However, I was at the library the other day and it was there, so I checked it out and watched it.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Don’t get me wrong: the movie is definitely not for children or even for teens. Like the book, it’s very very funny (especially if you enjoy British humor) but it’s vulgar, loaded with profanity, contains somewhat explicit sexual references and images and, on its surface, presents a view of human sexuality that is opposed to the Catholic understanding of it. For these reasons I probably wouldn’t recommend it for most adults, frankly.
Except for the fact that it is a pretty good fictional explication of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
“Huh?” you say.
As I was watching it, I kept thinking of Christopher West’s image of the dumpster versus the banquet. JP II says in Theology of the Body that men and women long for communion–true communion with one another and especially and ultimately with God. We are wired to long for that communion–the hope of Heaven. We are starving for love and connectedness.
Christopher West says that the modern world presents to love-starved men and women a vision of human sexuality that is equivalent to leading a food-starved person to a dumpster and telling him that’s as good as it gets. Modern sex–hooking up, shacking up, and so on–is dumpster diving. It is rubbish fed to people so desperate for love that they’ll settle for anything.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, presents love-starved men and women with a banquet of true love and connectedness in the practice of chaste married love and the understanding that all human love is a mere glimpse into the perfect communion of Heaven.
Bridget Jones is a stand-in for all men and women: she doesn’t want to be alone. She longs for connection. Daniel Cleaver is the dumpster. Mark Darcy is the banquet. Early in the movie, Bridget dives head first into the dumpster, gorges herself on garbage, and thinks she’s happy this way. The banquet is always there, in view. At first she can’t see it for what it truly is (the “sin makes you stupid” concept. Hat tip to Mark Shea.) but eventually she comes to see that the banquet is what she was really longing for.
To perceive this TOTB angle in a movie like Bridget Jones, you must be able to forgive quite a lot of vulgarity and crudity, but TOTB is there, and I’m glad for it–this was an extremely popular movie, so apparently a lot of people were exposed to the positive message that the dumpster does not satisfy and they should keep looking for “something extraordinary.”
The performances were excellent. I’ve seen the movie several times now and the principal actors are “something extraordinary,” especially Colin Firth, who plays Mark Darcy–the banquet. A subtle and fascinating performance.
Definitely not saying you should all go rent it and watch it. It might be offensive. The happy ending to the story is that instead of fornicating with the insufferable prat Daniel Cleaver, Bridget will now proceed to fornicate with the good man Mark Darcy. Oh well. That’s the way modern stories portray it. Perhaps the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, upon which Fielding based her novel, would be a better choice because it ends with the heroine marrying the right guy. (Firth plays Darcy in that one, too–LOL!)
