This enjoyable romantic comedy was pretty interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the discussion I had about it afterward. The discussion lasted almost as long as the film's 90 minute running time. But first, the movie.

Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) is a 32-year-old single woman who works in a publishing company. She thinks she's overweight, she thinks she's incompetent, and she thinks that she will never be happy. That she's wrong about all three is something she will have to wait until the end of the film to figure out. She begins a diary in which she records her obsessing over her weight, drinking, smoking, and general incompetence. Anyway, she attends a Christmas party where her mother (Gemma Jones), who is always looking to set her up with somebody, introduces her to Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a handsome but rude lawyer. She overhears him calling her "verbally incontinent," and she quickly sours on him. Instead, she turns her attentions toward her boss, Peter (Hugh Grant), who is a womanizing jerk. Since she has such a low opinion of herself, she thinks he's great, especially when he starts sending her provocative emails. They begin a torrid relationship centered on sex, and she seems happy with it. She keeps running into Mark, however, and he tries really hard not to be a jerk. In fact, he is sometimes charming. He's dating a cold lawyer, though, and Peter and Mark have a history: Peter tells her that Mark ran off with his fiancee and broke his heart. After a weekend getaway, Peter has to return to work. She visits him and finds "an American stick insect" naked in his bathroom. Distraught, she returns to her apartment, loneliness, and food and drink.

Gradually, though, she starts to figure out that she is not fat, she is not incompetent, and she can do better than him. Even better, she realizes that she doesn't really need a man to be happy, although it wouldn't hurt. I won't give away any more, and you can probably figure it out from your knowledge of romantic comedy conventions.

Renee Zellweger is among the most charming actresses around. There is something about her that makes you smile when she comes onscreen. She brought Bridget to life, and her accent was pretty good too. She apparently put on a little weight to fit the part, making her look like a normal pretty woman. Hugh Grant didn't have to stretch too much to play the womanizing jerk, and Colin Frith made being a stuffy Englishman look somehow loveable.

Now, some critics faulted it (and the book) for reinforcing negative stereotypes of women being fat, incompetent, and completely without confidence. After seeing the movie, I felt that, because a great many women do feel the way Bridget does, and therefore identified with her, her realization in the end that she is neither fat nor incompetent, and that she does not have to settle for a jerk in order to stop being lonely, is a positive thing. If so many women identify with her, then having her figure out that she never really had anything to worry about might make these women start to wonder about themselves. You can't fault the movie for creating a character that many women identify with. Instead, I think it deserves praise for creating such a character who ends up happy with herself. Within the bounds of the romantic comedy genre, this film did all it could to create a character who we identify as someone authentic, create comedic situations concerning her worries, and say that she did was not inferior. I can't ask much more of it. If it had been a serious movie, then it could have dealt more in-depth with the factors that made her feel the way she did, like the women's magazines that show bone-thin models as normal. But it was a romantic comedy, and it did a good job balancing comedy and message.