Tagline: Sane Bridget, Brand New Diary.
At long last Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) – 30-something, self-doubting, self-analyzing, career-minded, calorie-counting London singleton – has found romantic bliss. For six glorious weeks (71 ecstatic shags), she has been the girlfriend of the exquisitely flawless lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and nothing could be better. Or-could it?
Despite Darcy’s apparent devotion, Bridget still finds herself asking questions about life, love and the proper way to put away underwear. Having finally found her man, Bridget is faced with the equally flummoxing challenge of keeping him. She can’t help but wonder: what exactly is it that comes after the happily ever after?
And just as she’s starting to figure it all out, enter the competition: Darcy’s drop-dead, legs-up-to-there, never-says-the-wrong-thing new colleague. Suddenly jealousy, uncertainty and temptation – in the form of Bridget’s former boss and womanizing heart-throb Daniel Cleaver – threaten to upend Bridget’s dream in a comic maze of bad advice, silly mix-ups and total disasters that could only happen to her.
In a story that travels from the streets of London to the shores of Thailand – and finds Bridget skydiving (or falling), skiing (sort of) and going straight to jail (all a big mistake, really) – Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason takes our beloved Bridget on a hilarious and unexpected new journey as she navigates the treacherous territory of modern love without ever losing her inimitable sense of humor.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is a 2004 British-American romantic comedy film directed by Beeban Kidron and written by Adam Brooks, Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, and Helen Fielding, based on Fielding’s novel of the same name. It stars Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones, Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, and Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver. The sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), the film was released in the United Kingdom on 12 November 2004 and in the United States a week later on 19 November 2004 to generally negative reviews from critics. Despite this, the film was a box office success, grossing over $260 million worldwide.
Romantic Fantasy (V. Good) Meets Romantic Reality (Horrors)
“Bridget Jones is a love pariah no more!” – Bridget Jones
When novelist Helen Fielding first created the character of Bridget Jones, she caused a sensation by revealing to the world a contemporary single woman’s secret diary. Therein, Bridget revealed in devastatingly witty, unabashedly uncensored dialogue the inner-most desires of “singletons” everywhere…namely to be thin, clever, cigarette-free, unavoidably sexy and, most of all, deeply loved one day in the near future. The gamely struggling, perpetually in crisis character of Bridget soon evolved into far more than just an acclaimed novel’s heroine-she became a cultural phenomenon and quintessential symbol of flummoxed yet fervently hopeful single women everywhere.
The subsequent film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary soared with moviegoers around the globe, eventually grossing more than $280 million worldwide, establishing the film as one of the biggest British motion pictures ever made and the titular character as a heroine (of sorts) for her times.
Yet, despite all the success, Fielding felt Ms. Jones had more stories to tell. The author decided to take Bridget on a new journey – transporting her from her previous state of rampant romantic fantasy directly into the confusion and chaos of romantic reality. With Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, published in 2000, Fielding brought Bridget back, just as chubby, error-prone, cigarette-yearning and overwhelmed by modern life as ever, but suddenly in possession of the one thing for which she’d so fervently wished-a gorgeous, adoring boyfriend and the giddy delirium of infatuation. It seemed perfect. But Fielding knew that, after just a few weeks of fairytale romance, Bridget would have to face the morning-after question that haunts all contemporary romantics: how do you make love work once you’ve managed to do the impossible and find it?
The resulting story, which took Bridget not only into her first serious romantic entanglement, but also into laugh-out-loud new career challenges and an unexpected scrape with the law in Thailand, was another run-away bestseller, which the San Francisco Chronicle noted “outshines its predecessor.”
Meanwhile, the producers who brought Bridget Jones’s Diary to the screen-and subsequently optioned Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason based on the extraordinary appeal of the character-saw the new book as an opportunity to tell an entirely different comic tale with Bridget at the center.
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
Bridget Jones’s Diary: The Edge of Reason (2004)
Directed by: Beeban Kidron
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Jacinda Barrett, Jim Broadbent, Celia Imrie, James Faulkner, Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson, Neil Pearson
Screenplay by: Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding
Production Design by: Gemma Jackson
Cinematography by: Adrian Biddle
Film Editing by: Greg Hayden
Costume Design by: Jany Temime
Set Decoration by: Anna Lynch-Robinson
Art Direction by: Paul Inglis, David Warren
Music by: Harry Gregson-Williams, Stuart Roslyn
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: November 19, 2004
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