Renée Zellweger returns to the role that earned the actor her first Oscar nomination and Colin Firth is back as proper barrister Mark Darcy.
In the third installment of the comedy trilogy, one corner of a familiar love triangle has been swapped out: Hugh Grant's character Daniel Cleaver, who doesn't appear in Bridget Jones's Baby. Sandra Gregory stated that the scenes involving the Thai prison probably received inspiration from her incident since Helen Fielding knew the next door neighbors of her parents and presumably would have talked to them.Much has changed on and off-screen since the last time an excerpt from the diary of British "singleton" Bridget Jones made it to theaters. Tracie Bennett won an Audie Award for Comedy Best Actress for her audiobook narrations of both this and its predecessor. As a self-referential in-joke, Colin Firth plays Mark Darcy in both Bridget Jones movies. Bridget even meets Colin Firth and interviews him for a newspaper article. Much is made of Bridget's fascination with the BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Colin Firth, the actor who played Mr. Later in the Fielding novel, when Giles and Rebecca become romantically involved, Fielding parodies Austen's description of Captain Benwick and Louisa having fallen in love over poetry, commenting that Giles and Rebecca "fell in love over self-help books". This, with a happier immediate outcome, also happens in Persuasion, when Wentworth overhears Anne making a similar observation about "women's constancy" to Captain Harville, and writes her a proposal which he gets to her by stealth. At Bridget's mother's Book Club poetry reading, Mark overhears Bridget commenting that women remain fixated on men who have forgotten them, and is moved to write her a secret note expressing his continuing regard (which he then fails to give to her due to a mix-up). Then, when Bridget attends her goddaughter Constance's birthday party, Mark Darcy rescues her from a young male child who is determined to climb onto her back in Persuasion, Captain Wentworth (Anne's lost love) does precisely the same thing, in the same manner, for Anne. In both cases, the protagonist (Anne/Bridget) first overhears Darcy praising Rebecca/Louisa for being "resolute" - praise of the very trait that contributes to the accident. She also reworks several scenes in Persuasion: for example, Rebecca, Bridget's rival for Mark's affection, dives into a shallow river and hurts her foot, a mirror of the incident in Persuasion when Louisa, Anne's rival, falls on her head at Lyme. Again, Fielding borrows a name from Austen, this time a Giles Benwick, after Captain Benwick.
There are parallels between The Edge of Reason and the Austen novel Persuasion, in which the main character is persuaded by her friends to break off her relationship with her "true love". It also involves many misunderstandings, a few work mishaps, and an adventure in Southeast Asia involving planted drugs and Madonna songs.įielding has said that the first Bridget Jones story was based on the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. The comic novel follows the characteristic ups and downs of the self-proclaimed singleton's first real relationship in several years. It chronicles Bridget Jones's adventures after she begins to suspect that her boyfriend, Mark Darcy, is falling for a rich young solicitor who works in the same firm as him, a woman called Rebecca. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is a 1999 novel by Helen Fielding, a sequel to her popular Bridget Jones' Diary.