I really enjoyed Bridget Jones's Baby. Sure it's corny, it all takes place in a fantasy bubble of well-bred, well-heeled, well-mannered Englishness, and I have some serious reservations about the ending (I promise not to spoil it, though it turns out the father is the archangel Gabriel). But it's funny, it's warm, and in one respect at least it's surprisingly real: it stars a middle-aged woman who plays, and looks like, a middle-aged woman.
There's no doubt Renee Zellweger, who is 47, looks very different than she did when she first played Bridget Jones, which was in 2001, or even when she last played her, which was 2004. There have been reams of speculation about whether or not this is down to plastic surgery, botox or some other intervention, but surely the answer is far simpler. She's older.
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Trailer: Bridget Jones's Baby
Bridget is back and unexpectedly pregnant. In cinemas September 2016.
I guess we're all a little thrown because we're just not that used to seeing a female romantic lead in her late 40s looking like she's in her late 40s.
The frenzied and slightly distasteful discussion of "Renee Zellweger's face" began in late 2014 when the actress – who hadn't made a movie since 2010 – was photographed on the red carpet with a "new look" that had some crying foul.
It peaked in June when Owen Gleiberman, the newly appointed chief critic at Variety, penned a piece bemoaning the disappearance of his favourite "ordinary" beauty, seemingly a victim of self-loathing. "I just hope it turns out to be a movie that stars Renee Zellweger," he wrote, "rather than a victim of 'Invasion of the Face Snatchers'."
The face that launched a thousand quips, late 2014. Photo: Getty
The piece was roundly condemned, and even drew Zellweger into the fray. In a response penned for The Huffington Post, she wrote: "Not that it's anyone's business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes."
Take that as a denial if you wish, or as an evasion, but she's right – it's none of our business. Though it might be our business to wonder what might have driven her to it if she had.
Zellweger has said she stopped making movies in her early 40s because acting no longer satisfied her needs. "When I stopped making films, it was because it became more depleting than rewarding," she said. She did volunteer work, she went back to college, she started a relationship.
It may also be the case that she simply stopped being offered decent parts. By the time she dropped out she was 41, when roles for female actors become thin on the ground. Few of them are leads.
It's all right, Bridget. None of us is getting any younger.
According to a terrific piece of research by the site Polygraph, which data-mined 2000 Hollywood movies, 70 per cent of words spoken by female characters went to women aged between 22 and 41. Only 25 per cent went to actresses over the age of 42.
Meanwhile, men aged 42 and above are in their prime. They get almost half (44 per cent) of all lines spoken by men. What's more, men aged 42-65 get more lines than all female actors combined.
Zellweger was already 27 when she appeared in Jerry Maguire, the film that made her a star. The window for roles as the ingenuous, sleepy-eyed girl-next-door was always likely to be slender. As her looks changed, maybe Hollywood needed a period of adjustment, in which she could settle into being something else – a middle-aged woman, say. Maybe she needed that too.
Frozen in time: Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).
At any rate, the adjustment has been made. She has made three films in rapid succession this year. She plays a wife and mother in the legal thriller The Whole Truth, with Keanu Reeves (who – surprise – looks older than he used to). She plays a wife and mother in Same Kind of Different as Me, with Greg Kinnear (he looks older too). And in Bridget Jones's Baby, the first to be released, she plays a 43-year-old "singleton" who longs to be a wife and mother. Hugh Grant isn't in this one, but Colin Firth (yep, older) is.
I confess that as I watched Bridget Jones's Baby I too wondered what Zellweger might or might not have done to her face. But then I started to wonder about why she might have done it. And then I stopped wondering because it dawned on me that, mostly, she simply looks her age.
If she were a man, that would be utterly unremarkable. No one would bat an eyelid (surgically altered or otherwise) at a bloke of 47 headlining a movie. But because she's a woman, it's noteworthy.
I hope she's around long enough to see the day when it isn't.
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
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