CHICAGO — Thank you, Nara Schoenberg, for echoing in print what my disgruntled feminine sense and sensibility felt after watching “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (“Why would `Bridget’ filmmakers prefer a kitten to a lion?, April 16).
“Lobotomized” is indeed the right description of this screen-heroine, posing for a modern single woman. Bridget is lobotomized a la Miramax, cute and clumsy, and devoid of a single intelligent line of dialogue — yet men can’t break away from her, “the way she is.”
This Bridget is a bimbo, and if the plot were true to the nature of its newly created “heroine,” men would seduce her and leave her the morning after, again and again. It’s a film I’d rather have seen than this sugercoated lie of a modern tale.
More than 20 years ago, Julie Christie was a more bold, eloquent, independent and funny Bridget Jones in “Darling” than this screen-Bridget Jones of 2001. While young men deserve to be portrayed as unrecognized geniuses in “Good Will Hunting,” young women get to wear a bra under a see-through chiffon shirt as expression of self-assertion. One of the most depressing aspects of the Bridget Jones experience is the three stars it received from the Chicago Tribune film critic.
— Bettina Kozlowski
