Bridget Jones has grown up

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the fourth outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger and I was not especially hopeful. Who can still be bothered? Particularly after that silly Thai jail business (second film) and then all that flailing about in the mud at a music festival (third).

But this takes you right back to when you did care. The franchise (this time directed by Michael Morris) seems to have finally grown up a bit, and explores loss and grief with surprising depth. That said, it still knows exactly what it is, and what to deliver, and is in touch with its former self via nostalgic nods to blue soup, big pants and those penguin pajamas first seen 24 years ago. They’re faded but still going strong. (I think we can safely assume they are not from Primark.)

When the film first opens, we find Bridget, who is now 51, in a sad situation, very sad indeed. She had married Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the Austen-inspired man of her dreams, but he had died four years ago. He was blown up in Sudan while on an humanitarian mission. A sexy, honorable death for a sexy, honorable fella. Bowel cancer would never have dared. Firth still appears, but spectrally. (He’s just as hot in the next world in case that was a concern.)

Bridget is now bringing up their two young children on her own. They live in Hampstead in a chaotic house. Everything in her fridge has expired and she sets pasta on fire, which is all very Bridge, but here’s what’s different. She may be an impractical mother but she isn’t an asinine one. I was strangely moved by how she helps her kids negotiate the bereavement. “Do you miss Dada sometimes?” one asks. “I miss him all the times,” she replies.

It’s a clever ploy, killing off Darcy. This way Bridget is a “singleton” again without, say, a messy divorce intruding to sully the dream. She’s back to square one with everyone asking: “Are you still on your own?” She returns to work as the producer on a daytime TV show while her friends encourage her to try dating — otherwise “your vagina will reseal.” I don’t believe that to be medically accurate but they are only trying to help.

She meets the unfortunately named Roxster (Leo Woodall), who is 29 years old, and they embark on an affair that is tenderly handled. There is also a teacher at her children’s school (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) who corrals children with a whistle like Captain von Trapp but might there be something softer going on under there? Both fellas have reason to take their tops off while no ladies do at all. Progress.

Zellweger is, as ever, terrific as squinty-faced Bridget with her cowboy walk and her way of smiling bravely while her eyes fill with tears. The film couldn’t work unless we felt affection for our heroine and we do. Meanwhile, Hugh Grant, who plays the cad and bounder that is Daniel Cleaver, has some of the best lines. He has a son he hasn’t seen for years who has been brought up by an Italian aristocrat who, he says, “wears his sweater as a shawl.” I laughed — even though, to see men wearing sweaters as shawls, you don’t have to go further than Hampstead. There are moments, I should add, when even Cleaver seems to have developed self-awareness.

It may not have the sardonic bite of the first film, and it sometimes slips into sentimentality, but it sharply marries the contemporary with the age-old and I enjoyed it. Perhaps, after last week’s three-hour Iranian political thriller, I had earned it too?