Cinemazlowski Double review: 'Bridget Jones's Baby' and 'Snowden'

Sep 16, 2016

When Renee Zellweger burst into fame as Tom Cruise's quirky, humble girlfriend in "Jerry McGuire" back in 1996, her impish look and shy girlish voice endeared her instantly to audiences worldwide. She managed to build a solid career quickly, even winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for "Cold Mountain," but her biggest success came taking on the title role in the critically acclaimed 2001 film adaptation of the wildly popular best-selling novel, "Bridget Jones's Diary."

 
In it, she played a single woman who had given up all hope of love, but decided to improve herself over the course of a year while looking for love and recording all the results in her diary. She found herself the object of affection for two dashing men played by Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, giving hope to lovelorn people everywhere that they could still attract the perfect partner.
 
Its 2004 sequel, "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," changed directors from the original's Sharon McGuire and wasn't nearly as popular – or good. The movie featured the same trio of stars, but as Bridget questioned whether she was really happy with her new relationship. And within a year or two, Zellweger started choosing a whole string of critically dismissed bombs, ultimately dropping off the film biz radar completely about five years ago.
 
But now both Zellweger and her most famous character, Bridget, are back with "Bridget Jones's Baby." It could have seemed like a pointless addition or a desperate cash grab, but instead the movie is thankfully the best and funniest in the bunch – no doubt due to the return of McGuire in the director's chair. (This recommendation indeed comes with moral caveats I address later in the review.)
 
This time Bridget has to figure out which of two men  - one from her past, and one new one - fathered her child. "Baby" starts out by finding Bridget alone and sad at age 43. Of course, she is comically portrayed in her sadness, and her best friend offers to take her to a wild rock music festival and encourages her to have sex with the first man she meets.

That man is Mark (Patrick Dempsey), a dashingly handsome American businessman who has invented a new phone app for dating. She falls into bed with him, then unwittingly leaves in the morning while he's out bringing her breakfast.

She next goes to a funeral, where she runs into her old flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is sweet but stodgy and now has a wife. But when they re-meet at a party following a christening, he reveals that he's separated from his wife and she seduces him.

Soon, Bridget is pregnant and realizes that she can't tell who the father is since she had sex with the two men just days apart. Her doctor (Emma Thompson) advises her to tell both men about the baby, setting off a competition between the men to prove each is the better father (or rather, father-in-waiting) in the hopes of winning both her love and the child for an instant family.

"Baby" has a lot of foul language and sexual euphemisms used comedically, but Zellweger invests Jones with such sweetness that it's hard to take as much offense with her as with almost any other character in a typical movie. That isn't to excuse the immoral behavior, but the tone of the movie makes it easier to enjoy as Bridget goes through the life events that eventually do lead to positive, moral decisions.

The sex scenes are basically racy foreplay, stronger than in most comedies yet cutting away before going very long or graphic. The movie's attitude towards casual sex is nonchalant initially, and the fact that she pairs up with the merely separated Darcy is questionable by any standard, Catholic or not.

One other troublesome aspect is a running gag of Bridget's mother running for her parish council, first opposing gay rights but eventually fully embracing the issues and the people in over-the-top comedic fashion. While somewhat funny in spite of itself, these moments add nothing to the main plot and could have easily been left out.

In another scene, a lesbian couple is shown in a parenting discussion group, with the two potential fathers of Bridget's baby mistakenly believed to be a gay couple with Bridget as a surrogate mother.

On the positive side, the movie never questions for a second that Bridget wants her unexpected pregnancy, and the pregnancy and babies are shown as being wonderful throughout to the point that it's basically a pro-life message.

SPOILER ALERT: Also, when Bridget does figure out which of the two men she truly loves, she has a church wedding with him. END SPOILER.
 
Thus, this is a movie that sounds more morally questionable on paper than it actually plays onscreen. There is a place in storytelling that can show characters who are making mistakes with their lives as long as they work towards a more positive moral lifestyle, and this is one of those films – albeit just for adults.

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It may seem like a cliché and an impossibility in modern times that one person can literally change the world, but Edward Snowden showed it can be done. The former CIA intelligence analyst shocked the world, and in particular the American government, in 2013 when he jetted out of the country with a massive trove of top-secret information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its metadata collection programs that basically invaded the privacy of every American living on the grid.
 
Snowden was trying to flee to Ecuador, but famously got stranded in Russia when the U.S. government revoked his passport while he was amid a layover at a Russian airport. Three years later, he remains in limbo in Russia, a man without a country and a figure of international controversy and mystery.
 
The new movie "Snowden" reveals the whole story, or at least Snowden's side of it, and arrives in theatres Friday as a movie that's not only well-made and compelling, but downright important. Its depiction of just how far even our supposedly saintly government will go if watchdogs don't stay alert is frightening, yet its portrait of a man who stood up and shook the most powerful leaders on the planet to the core is an indelibly brave one.
 
"Snowden" opens with Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting documentary filmmaker Laura Pointras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) of the British newspaper The Guardian in a crowded Hong Kong mall. They quickly hide out in Snowden's hotel room, where he starts the process of extensive video interviews revealing all he knows to the world.
 
The goal is to tape him quickly and get a story written by Greenwald and fellow journalist Ewan McAskill (Tom Wilkinson) in time to beat the CIA from catching them all first. The reason why they know the clock is ticking is that the Guardian's editors had to follow legal protocols and make sure that the articles would not result in massive blowback from U.S. officials.
 
Once they found that the publication of the article couldn't be stopped, the clock began ticking because it was a certainty that the CIA would be racing to capture Snowden and his cohorts as a show of force to the world. As Snowden and his team effect a complicated escape from Hong Kong for him, the movie jumps back and forth across multiple phases of his career, showing the shocking layers of knowledge he gained at each stage that led to his decision to bring the NSA's nefarious efforts down.
 
Director Oliver Stone, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kieran Fitzgerald, has a long history of making movies ("Platoon," "JFK," "Wall Street" and "W.") that tackle controversial political subjects and people. While he's a multiple Oscar-winner, he has often allowed his movies to slip into bombast to make their points – yet here, he manages to keep the tone moving and humanly relatable throughout.
 
Snowden's relationship with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) is a particularly stirring aspect of the film. A liberal Iraq war protester who had a vastly different worldview than diehard conservative Snowden, she slowly has an effect on waking him up to the idea that it was okay to question a president rather than blindly adhere to one. But the film draws great moments from the immense stress Snowden's secretive life had on the couple.
 
Yet that very lesson gives the movie a fascinating kick, as the NSA programs started under George W. Bush's administration only become worse under President Obama's, despite his promises of vast reform and great change for the better. In fact, the movie is such a strong indictment of how badly Obama allowed the program to expand that it's an amazing reminder of our First Amendment protections.
 
This fact, which makes the film seem to be conservative in nature, has no doubt impacted the general critical response it's gotten from the nation's critics. I know for a fact that the critics in Los Angeles are extremely liberal – it is a long story that I can share in another column. In the chatter after the critics' screening I attended, in fact, some of them complained not about the film's qualities but their annoyance that it presented the negative truth about Obama's administration so directly.
 
This is a masterfully made film, regardless of how you view its politics.
 
The fact that this film was made by Oliver Stone, a man who is considered one of the strongest left-wingers in Hollywood, is a testament to just how dire our government's abuse of power was and how brave Snowden is. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a terrific job immersing himself into the role so fully that his entire speech patterns are fully transformed, and he manages to bring a powerful emotional undercurrent to the film even in spite of having to keep his deepest thoughts secret much of the time.
 
Morally, the movie does feature about 50 F words scattered across its 2 hour 20 minute running time. Most of these are bunched into specific tense situations – arguments over the policies, or a big fight between Edward and  his girlfriend, and in context, they're not nearly as offensive as when F words are paraded through raunchy comedies.
 
The one other element to be aware of is a fairly graphic sex scene that lasts about 30 seconds between Edward and his girlfriend, which shows a brief shot of her bare breasts from the side and her bare behind as well. While the scene could have been more implied, there is a very key aspect to it that is one of the film's biggest and most important surprise revelations to the actual plot.
 
For viewers who can handle those aspects of the movie, it all adds up to a film that not only is a must for anyone who cares about the state of our nation, since this was a program that was abused by both parties. The movie's message is clear: our nation will only remain great if we remain vigilant about those who control it.

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