NOTE: These comments are entirely based on an experience of watching the movie, not from reading the book.
Though I enjoyed watching the movie, I didn't like anyone in it, particularly the protagonist. It seemed to me that she didn't have any virtues; as
Dorian says in the
Bridget Jones's Diary node, "she's an idiotic, self-obsessed, calorie-counting, chain-smoking, 30-something airhead." I was most bothered by her self-obsessedness--she's really not nice to anybody, and seems almost exclusively to interact with others as means to her ends. From a
Kantian point of view, this is absolutely awful, and, despite not really agreeing with Kant on many issues, I had to back him in this case.
I found these flaws in her character to be both obvious and fundamentally damning. My companions, however (both of whom were
female, while I am
male), felt quite differently about her. One of them later suggested to me, by way of explanation, that she was able to identify with Bridget's
lack of self-confidence, and with the effect that this has on her reactions to the world. She then observed, more to emphasize than to give me information I didn't have already, that I am extremely
secure about who I am, and that this trait is sort of rare.
I don't know to what degree my reaction to the movie was based on my
level of security, and I also can't comment on the similarity of other men to me in this regard, but I would caution other men to try to be aware of this potential difference between themselves and the women with whom they interact--it seems to me that men are encouraged to question themselves less than women in the cultures with which I am familiar. I think there is a more general point to be made about high-security people of either gender, in that I think such people are not encouraged to
empathize with those who are less certain of themselves, but the division along
gender lines seems important enough that it's worth emphasizing.
I'd like to invite others with thoughts about how one ought to treat low-self-esteem folks, or insights into their minds, to add writeups about them here or elsewhere. I am interested; I don't quite have enough
perspective on this at the moment to make good judgments.