Can McDreamy Fans "Enjoy Bridget Jones's Baby"?
The release of Bridget Jones's Baby, the third (and final?) film in the Bridget Jones trilogy, has raised many important questions. Is it reductive for a romantic comedy made in 2016 to be so hyper-focused on a woman's need for babies and boyfriends? Is it fair that a romantic comedy about uncertain paternity be touted as "heart-warming" when in real life, we slut-shame women who are unsure about the father of their children? But one question stands above all the rest and deserves careful response: Is it possible to enjoy this film if you're still not over the death of Dr. Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd, Patrick Dempsey's character on Grey's Anatomy? The answer: kind of, but you’re going to have to work for it.
A quick rundown of Bridget if you haven't seen the film or the trailer, which includes literally 97 percent of the movie's plot points: Bridget Jones sleeps with two very different men in the same week, gets pregnant, doesn't want an amniocentesis because the needle is too big, and accordingly spends her pregnancy in two quasi-relationships with two quasi-dads. Then she has a baby! The end. (I'm being glib, but it was actually a cute romantic comedy that I'll happily watch again on TBS someday.)
Dempsey plays Jack, a smiley, charming, successful man. On a plot level, he spends the entire movie in a love triangle - more specifically, a love triangle includes a man named Mark - not unlike Derek in early seasons of Grey's Anatomy, when he and McSteamy were fighting over Derek’s ex-wife, Addison. But it’s on a character level that you realize Jack and Derek are basically the same guy. (If we’re being real, Dempsey plays the same character in the lion's share of his projects. That's not a dig! He's good at it.)
Like Derek, Jack relishes surprises and grand gestures. He shows up unannounced at one of Bridget’s big work presentations; he barges uninvited into her apartment with flowers and gifts; he puts shoes directly on her feet, Cinderella-style. But Bridget didn’t actually ask for any of those things from him. Like Derek, Jack demonstrates a combination of good intentions and vague oblivion when it comes to satisfying the woman he loves. Remember Derek's insistence that he was Meredith's "knight in shining whatever"? That was a lovely sentiment, but Meredith wasn't asking for someone to rescue her.
When Jack, the genius creator of a dating service’s compatibility algorithm, runs Bridget's stats through his formula, he discovers they're a near perfect match. And yet when push comes to shove, Bridget (spoiler) chooses Mark. Because Jack is dreamy, yes, but he has his limitations.
There was a limit to Derek Shepherd's dreaminess too. Yes, I believe that he and Meredith were the loves of each other's lives, and I miss their relationship (even though I believe Grey's might just be better than ever now that he's gone). But dreaminess notwithstanding, he struggled throughout the series to be a truly reciprocal partner. He was the one who decided to adopt Zola, but then later he struggled to equally split the work of child-rearing with Meredith. He prized his own career and his own way of doing things over anyone else's.
None of those things make him a bad person, or even a bad partner. But Cristina Yang put it best when saying good-bye to Meredith: "[Derek] is very dreamy. But he is not the sun. You are the sun." Dreamy, yes, but also flawed, frustrating, sometimes controlling, and now dead.
And so Bridget Jones's Baby stings less as a reminder of the fact that we'll never see Derek Shepherd again, and more as double-confirmation that dreaminess is something but it's certainly not everything. Jack still ends up alone, watching Bridget marry Mark, holding the baby that isn't his. As romantic comedies go, that's dark … although not as dark as Grey's assurance that, dreamy or not, we all die someday. To sum it up: Derek and Jack are indeed very similar - but conflate them at your own peril.
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