By Joshua Le Suer

After a whomping weekend marathon of the original director's cut of "Birth of a Nation", "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "My Fair Lady" left me feeling like, as the old-time humorists would say, I had a head full of rivets, I decided the best way to thaw myself out and evaporate that aftertaste of leaden perfectionism was by viewing the gaberdine Helen Fielding adaptation, "Bridget Jones's Diary", which features a pleasingly-plump, chain-smoking, rum-soaked Rene Zellweger as the literary heroine title character, the love-seeking, luckless queen of the cubicle-bound klutzbergers.

Bridget's dear ole ma's notion of haute cuisine is gherkins on toothpicks, and she is forever trying to match her dumpy daughter up with such abrasive types as Colin Farrell's Mark Darcy, a glowering lawyer with rimed arteries, whose fondest memory of Miss Jones is her, as a wee lass, splashing about in his "paddling pool" in the altogether.

At work, her co-workers, depending on their gender, either give her leering looks and forget her name, or jackboot her around and listen in on her personal calls, while the bonny bosshead, played by Hugh Grant in a rare scoundrel role, is a witty, charming Doc Shop-Knife who swaps come-hither e-mails over Bridget's scrap of a skirt and, after they become an item, monkeys around with a venomous American who is thin as a murmur.

Obviously, only a deus ex machina of galactic proportions, or some uncharacteristic kindness from cold fish Darcy, can rescue Bridget from the unholy mess that is her life.

Zellweger, who applied an extra 20 pounds to her gauzy frame and a Britonian buff to her voice to become the globular, gushy Bridget, captured my heart right from the credits, when she lip-synchs to Jamie O'Neal's "All By Myself" with dramatic flourishes, then on through the movie as she, asked an ivory-tower question by Salman Rushdie, answers by wondering aloud the location of the "loo", declares triumphantly to her mother over the phone, while entangled in bed with Grant, that she is a "wanton sex goddess", all the way to the crowd-pleasing finale, where she darts through the streets in pursuit of Firth, through a London winter cold as a wedge, in tiger-stripe undies and a t-shirt.

Of course, it's a snap to be charming with a pizazzy army of co-stars that include Jim Broadbent as the stammering, bewildered patriarch of the Jones family, Shirley Henderson as Bridget's thin-voiced, skittish best friend, Jude, James Callus as Tom, a lascivious crooner of meteoric success and Sally Phillips as Shazzer, the other chum, a hay-haired journalist, whose vocabulary is as blue as the disastrous "string soup" Bridget prepares for a dinner party.