Keeping Up With the Jones

When it was announced that they were making a movie of Helen Fielding’s snazzy, flighty retelling of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Bridget Joness Diary’, no one was surprised. Predictable yelps of outrage went up, however (particularly from the Little Englanders of the mid-market tabloids), when it was announced that American Renée Zellweger — not Kate Winslet, not Helena Bonham Carter and not (thank God) Liz Hurley —had won the lead role. Meanwhile, cynics prepared themselves for another mediocre British romantic comedy compromised by Hollywood investment. But if you keep an open mind and go see it, you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise — from Zeliweger, who’s terrific, and from the film itself, which is really rather good. Largely faithful to the book (if that’s important to you), ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ manages to be mainstream yet reasonably inventive, cute yet not cloying, and even oddly touching in places. There is a darkening sense of misery in the scenes where Bridget drowns her sorrows alone, washed up on the couch like Tom Hanks in ‘Cast Away’, though fortuitously equipped with vodka and a stereo. Like ‘Notting Hill’, another Working Title production, the film counterpoints British insecurity with Yankee slickness, but it doesn’t feel the need to flatter the American audience. In fact, the film is so English in its mindset in some ways (just by having a heroine who smokes and swears, for example) one wonders if the US audience will take to it at all. Presumably that’s where Zeliweger comes in.

Round-faced and with deep-set eyes that disappear further with her scrunchy smiles, she is the kind of pretty that only Hollywood would see as ‘ordinary-looking’. It’s that girl-next-door quality, leavened with a focused, energetic on-screen presence that took her from TV films, Z-grade franchise movies (‘The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre’) and kooky indie films (‘Empire Records’, ‘Love and a .45’) in her early career to her seemingly bolt-from-the-blue breakthrough as Tom Cruise’s single-mom love interest in ‘Jerry Maguire’. Her choices since that success have been patchy: big parts in bad movies that barely got released (‘A Price Above Rubies’, ‘One True Thing’) and sidelined sidekicks/girlfriends in mainstream vehicles for male actors, such as Jim Carey (whom she began dating afterwards and broke up with in December) in ‘Me, Myself and Irene’ and Chris O’Donnell in ‘The Bachelor’. Until Bridget, Zeliweger’s juiciest role was as amnesiac, soap-obsessed Betty Sizemore in ‘Nurse Betty’, for which she deservedly won a Golden Globe.

According to producer Jonathan Cavendish, ‘We all had a clear idea of what we were looking for
~director]Sharon Maguire and l even had a word fo nt: “Bridgetness”. When Renée walked through the door, we were half thrilled and half appalled; we’d found Bridget, but she was a Texan!’

Cavendish says the integral elements of ‘Bridgetness’ comprise ‘enthusiasm and vulnerability, i intelligence mixed with lack of confidence, a sympathetic, good-natured quality — and wildness’. To which he adds the rider, ‘and of course Bridget fans know she is not perfectly slim — and here was this perfectly slim actress standing in front of us’.

Actresses can’t win: they’re ridiculed if they’re too fat and berated as bad role models if they’re too thin. But fat isn’t a feminist issue for Zeliweger, who won’t be lured into denouncing the sizeist nature of the industry. Putting on weight was no more of a problem than ‘training for the dialogue, Or living here in England so that I’d know what Harvey Nicks was or who some of the television personalities are that Bridget refers to. It was just another part of the job.

Some people might mutter that having Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fight over this apparently normal woman could only ever happen in the movies,but at least letting the average-sized girl win goes a little way towards allaying female cruticisms that decry the regressive obsession with relationships, self-image & landing a man that are so fundamental to ‘Ally McBeal’, ‘Sex in the City’ & all the shows & books in the increasingly popular Cosmopolitan Chick Flick & Lit sub-genres.

I mention that one (male) critic thought it was incredibly ‘brave’ to go on screen weighing that much; (In fact she’s only about nine stone in the film) . Did she think she was brave? ‘What was brave was the first day shooting on a set full of real people when your ass is essentially landing on the camera operator’s face 20 times’ This is in reference to a scene where Bridget, having just got a job as a TV reporter must slide down a foreman’s pole in a mini-skirt straight onto the camera. No stunt bum was used. ‘Yes, I’m ashamed to say the Brazilian-sized bum was mine; & I don’t mean Brazilian in reference to the people, I mean in reference to the country. That was scary for me because I’m a fairly modest person. Not any more, now, before, with other shoots I’d be covering myself & going, ‘Boys out’’ & now I’m like ‘Whatever.’ I didn’t feel familiar or recognise my own body. it was strange to feel so uncomfortable & to be running around half naked with the crew full of men. That was a real challenge for me but it became fun.

For Zellweger, the bigger challenge was getting the accent right. Talking to me she sounds as American as a square dance, her own breathy, slightly Texan twang just audible but not too pronounced ( her mother is Norwegian & her father is Swiss, so she says she never sounded entirely Texan)In the film, although she’s slightly posher than you.d expect from the Sloane-baiting character in the book, to my ears it sounds like a perfectly convincing impersonation of the upper middle class Home Counties ‘gels’ you see clogging up the bars of Notting Hill. She trained with dialect coach Barbara Berkely even before she met the producers. ‘I didn’t want to be a part of it if I didn’t think I had a chance to nail it & do the accent properly. Because it’s an important book to a lot of people, & I didn’t wasnt to come in there & do a half-ass-rendition’

Once the film was greenlit with Zellweger in the role her preparations involved spending 14 weeks working incognito at Picador, publisher of the novel - which was director Sharon Maguire’s idea. There she spoke every minute with an English accent to polish it further & get a feel for Bridget’s world. Did the ewxperience provide a chance to disppear into the role, & prehaps from her own fame? ‘I’ve never been so aware of my own skin, Ever. Of my mouth, the way it workeds & what was coming out of it. I was second guessing everything I said. And that was the point - to have all that selfconsciousness dissipate’ At one point one of the girls in the office came up to her & told her how much she looked like ‘that woman in Jerry Maguire’ to which Zellweger feigned surprise.She was obviously convincing as a publicity assistant. ‘At the end of my stay there , a woman came over from a different department & said ‘I hear you’re leaving & I’m asking around to see if you can fill a post here’ It was the nicest, nicest thing. When my friend Tim gave his desk up for the me to go over to the other side of the partition, it was like’Goodbye! We’re going to miss you!’ when he was only on the other side of the bookshelf. It was a good excuse to have a cake. There was a lot of that. Camilla, who runs the publicity department there was my boss & she was wonderful

It was reported that one of her jobs was to cut out all the press clippings that referred to the film, including ones that denounced her casting as Bridget. Luckily, because she was the ‘new girl’, no one ever quizzed her about the television personalities she was boning up on. The experience helped because she ‘knew what to do when there was admin-ing or just sifting at the desk to be done. There are quite a few scenes we shot at the desk that aren’t in the film which for obvious reasons (we didn’t include] because you can’t keep people in a theatre for a week-and-a-half. So. I knew what to do, I knew where to sit, and! knew what her routine was about And that was invaluable. More than anything it was about feeling comfortable in that situation, including the accent, including the day-to-day regimen of the thing.’

Meanwhile, Berkeley’s insistence that she keep up the accent offset had other perks. ‘It was a great way to get straight to where you were going in a cab, and not go by Harrods four times. At first, I. was like; “So are there three Harrods in London?”

!‘m relieved to hear it wasn’t just Method acting silliness. Indeed, Zellweger is blessedly down-to-earth — she turns up for the photo-shoot refreshingly unfettered by any kind of PR entourage (unless you count the dog); and is happy to be photographed in her own clothes, sans make-up. She is also fairly free of the usual pretentious thespian guff. What she likes about acting is ‘the day; I like what the day’s about’, by which she seems to mean the variety, the immediate pleasures of it. What attracted her to the role was Bridget’s ‘relatable’, universal qualities (‘The book is hysterical and it’s hysterical because cellulite doesn’t have cultural boundaries’), although she felt responsible not to ‘blaspheme’ by ignoring its specificity.

In fact, it almost works to the film’s advantage that Zellweger is American, partly because she brings a certain gawky outsider quality to the role, and partly because she doesn’t come trailing too much baggage for the audience. As Bridget, Zellweger projects an air of giggly mischief, like a teenager pretending to be older than she is as she bluffs her way ineptly from being a publicist for a publishing company to being a television reporter.

She does the winsome stuff well, but also the prat-falls, and shows a particular aptitude for projecting embarrassed gameness, a very English trait— seen in Bridget’s irresistibly awful public speaking assignments, for example. ‘We were just finishing the sound edit yesterday,’ Cavendish says, ‘and I was watching Renée’s speech at the literary party for the 47,000th time — and I still laughed! The way she pulls herself up halfway through this disaster just makes me howl!’

You can well believe the stories that everyone liked her on set, especially when she paid for pizza for the whole crew one night Here she is, just another slightly jet-lagged (or hungover?) girl who distractedly picks at her nail polish and wears a jumper that’s starting to bobble. She gets a little defensive when Task her about how she connected to Bridget’s loneliness, perhaps wary that it’s leading to a question about her recent bust-up with Carrey. Minutes later, she’s starting to warm up again, asking me questions, telling rambling off-the-record anecdotes (but don’t worry — you’re not missing anything). By the end of the interview, I ask if it was any different working with a female director for the first time. She says, withan impish frankness, that the only advantage was: ‘1 could borrow tampons if I needed one.” Just the sort of thing Bridget Jones would say.

© Copyright of  Time Out  2001