The Beauty of Bridget

n "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot's titular protagonist measures his life in coffee spoons. Perennially lonely, he is left only with the mundane as his compass.

Bridget Jones, the quirky, slightly dumpy conception of British author Helen Fielding, might be the post-millennial female Prufrock, if such a thing is possible. The diary she keeps is the painstaking chronicle of a small life, filled with obsessive counts of cigarettes smoked, pounds gained and lost, and lovers coming and going. Fielding's novel distills the life of the single female into a character at once harmlessly neurotic and endearingly inept. Bridget is a caricature, for sure, but we can see a little of Bridget in all of us.

The book's on-screen adaptation, courtesy of director Sharon Maguire, deftly turns the book's episodic format into a comprehensible narrative. A chunky and perfectly cast Renée Zellweger sends Bridget up as a big-eyed, off-balance woman whose charm and wit shine through her ineptitude. Even as she stumbles through public speeches and makes an ass of herself on television and in public, Zellweger's Bridget always lands on her tottering feet.

And Bridget stumbles a lot. The film finds her caught in the typical romantic comedy love triangle between a slick, sexy boss (Hugh Grant) and the quiet, equally confused Mark Darcy, who's just been divorced and faces another miscast commitment. After Bridget catches her loverboy publisher boss in a roll in the hay with a waifish American ("I thought you said she was thin," the American sniffs when she's discovered), she finds herself ready to succumb to the subtler charms of Darcy, who, like the Austen character he not-so-subtly refers to, Bridget finds abominable at first.

But one calamity is never enough for Bridget. Her mother has split for a home shopping maven, leaving her father a sodden mess. Even as we laugh at Bridget's petty catastrophes, her parents remind us that bad choices aren't made only by the young.

Bridget Jones' Diary is not a great film; even with sharper acting and more believable personas, its characters still find themselves trapped in a romantic comedy world that elevates the overwrought and unbelievable.

But given its genre Bridget Jones' Diary is a triumph. Unlike a slighty-toussled Jennifer Anniston or Julia Roberts, Zellweger's Bridget actually elicits the empathy she's meant to. Maguire has taken the original book to the screen in a way that is more masterful and important than a simple tearjerker.