While the opening credits to director Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary appear on the screen, the title character (Renee Zellweger) sits on the couch in her pajamas and passionately sings into her hair-brush while her radio plays the 70s schmaltz-classic “All By Myself.” She weeps as she sings. The scene is remarkable not because it is funny — it’s not hard to see the comedy here — but because it is at the same time so honest, touching, and almost embarrassing to watch.

Jones, a single woman living alone and working as a junior editor at a London publishing house, unwisely falls in love with her boss, a self-confessed scoundrel named Daniel Cleaver (played with perfect pitch by Hugh Grant). Daniel is one of those characters who is great fun to watch in films — wittily obscene and monstrously self-centered, even while you thank God you don’t know someone like him in real life. I liked how, as played by Grant, you begin to like the guy, in spite of his essentially sleazy ways.

Although Bridget and Daniel are vivid personalities, the movie is little more than a series of set-pieces in which Bridget’s cutely awkward mannerisms and Daniel’s rakish habits play off their surroundings. And, with the exception of these two, there are no other real characters to be found here. So many of the movie’s peripheral characters, especially Bridget’s friends, are cardboard cutouts, and this flatness of character often gives Bridget very little to react to. Even so, Bridget herself is a lot of fun to hang out with.