Groundhog Day
(1993)PG
1h 41min
Comedy, Fantasy, Romance | Released on February 12, 1993 (USA)
Directed by
Harold Ramis
Writing Credits (WGA)
Danny Rubin...(screenplay) and
Harold Ramis...(screenplay)
Danny Rubin...(story)
Cast (in credits order)
Bill Murray...Phil
Andie MacDowell...Rita
Chris Elliott...Larry
Stephen Tobolowsky...Ned
Brian Doyle-Murray...Buster
Marita Geraghty...Nancy
Angela Paton...Mrs. Lancaster
Rick Ducommun...Gus
Rick Overton...Ralph
Robin Duke...Doris the Waitress
(1993)PG
1h 41min
Comedy, Fantasy, Romance | Released on February 12, 1993 (USA)
Directed by
Harold Ramis
Writing Credits (WGA)
Danny Rubin...(screenplay) and
Harold Ramis...(screenplay)
Danny Rubin...(story)
Cast (in credits order)
Bill Murray...Phil
Andie MacDowell...Rita
Chris Elliott...Larry
Stephen Tobolowsky...Ned
Brian Doyle-Murray...Buster
Marita Geraghty...Nancy
Angela Paton...Mrs. Lancaster
Rick Ducommun...Gus
Rick Overton...Ralph
Robin Duke...Doris the Waitress
Groundhog Day
Q: If you only had one day to live what would you do?
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Michael Faust reviews this film in the light of eternity.
Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer inspection it furnishes a dazzling treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, even illuminating Deleuze and Irigaray’s conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean idea. It also throws light on postmodern thinking regarding simulacra – representations without originals. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, casting its protagonist, played by Bill Murray, in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero.
Eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s idea that we have lived the exact life we are living now an infinite number of times in the past, and will do so an infinite number of times in the future. If we’ve enjoyed a particularly eventful and pleasurable life, this might sound like the greatest of tidings.
Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer inspection it furnishes a dazzling treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, even illuminating Deleuze and Irigaray’s conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean idea. It also throws light on postmodern thinking regarding simulacra – representations without originals. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, casting its protagonist, played by Bill Murray, in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero.
Eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s idea that we have lived the exact life we are living now an infinite number of times in the past, and will do so an infinite number of times in the future. If we’ve enjoyed a particularly eventful and pleasurable life, this might sound like the greatest of tidings.
Movie Review Groundhog Day (1993) Review/Film; Bill Murray Battles Pittsburgh Time Warp By JANET MASLIN Published: February 12, 1993 In "Groundhog Day," playing a formerly smug weatherman who finds himself condemned to relive one Feb. 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa., Bill Murray explains his feelings to two bleary-eyed, beer-drinking locals. "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and everything was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?" he asks despairingly. The two strangers listen very sympathetically. They didn't have to be trapped by a magic spell to know what he means.
That glimmer of recognition is what makes "Groundhog Day" a particularly witty and resonant comedy, even when its jokes are more apt to prompt gentle giggles than rolling in the aisles. The story's premise, conceived as a sitcom-style visit to the Twilight Zone, starts out lightweight but becomes strangely affecting. Phil Connors, Mr. Murray's amusingly rude Pittsburgh television personality, surely deserves to be punished for his arrogance. But who in the audience hasn't ever wished time would stand still and offer a second, third or even a 20th chance?
The jaded Phil, a perfect character for Mr. Murray, begins the story sounding terminally smooth. He refers to himself as "talent," and addresses a fellow newscaster as "Hairdo." He sneers at Punxsutawney and is contemptuous of his own charming producer (Andie MacDowell) and darkly funny cameraman (Chris Elliott). He even delivers pleasant-sounding insults to the proprietors of the bed-and-breakfast where he is staying, not realizing he may be staying there forever.
As directed breezily by Harold Ramis (who wrote the screenplay with Danny Rubin), "Groundhog Day" employs the sort of time-bending trickery that worked so well for "Back to the Future." Thus, Phil finds himself revisiting the recent past and coming face to face with people not fully aware of his special powers. On the first Feb. 2, he is cheerfully odious to everyone he meets, including an insurance salesman named Ned (Stephen Tobolowsky, hilarious as the quintessential pest). But as time goes by -- or doesn't -- Phil begins to try out different gambits, testing the limits of his plight. He learns that he can do nothing bad enough to keep himself from waking up under the same flowered quilt, listening to Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You, Babe" on the clock radio at 6 A.M. Not even smashing the radio to bits will make them shut up.
Wildly frustrated at first, Phil gradually begins to treat his plight as a learning experience. He can, for instance, take enough piano lessons to impress Ms. MacDowell's enchanting Rita, once he realizes how wrong he was to treat her badly. One of the film's many repetitive sequences shows Phil on a date with Rita, learning so much about her that he can begin sounding like a mind reader and passing himself off as the perfect mate. "You couldn't plan a day like this!" Rita finally sighs happily. "Well, you can," says Phil. "It just takes an awful lot of work."
The film makes the most of the sentimental possibilities in Phil's rehabilitation. (Viewers who notice Phil ignoring a panhandler on his first Groundhog Day will surely know where that setup is headed.) But it also has fun with the nihilism. Phil eagerly explores every self-destructive possibility now open to him, from jumping off buildings to smoking cigarettes to overeating and refusing to floss; at one point he even casually robs an armored truck, just to see if he can. "Well, what if there is no tomorrow?" he anxiously asks someone. "There wasn't one today!"
Mr. Murray is back in top form with a clever, varied role that draws upon the full range of his talents. As in "Scrooged," he makes a transition from supreme cynic to nice guy, and this time he does so with particularly good grace. Half Capra and half Kafka, the story of "Groundhog Day" presents golden opportunities, particularly in the gently romantic scenes with Ms. MacDowell. Mr. Murray is as believable and appealing at these moments as he is flinging insults. Ms. MacDowell, a warm comic presence and a thorough delight, plays a modern working woman while also reminding viewers that this is at heart a fairy tale. As Phil tries one desperate tactic after another, fairy tale fans will be way ahead of him, knowing what it takes to break a spell.
"Groundhog Day" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It includes mild profanity and tacit sexual situations. Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis; screenplay by Danny Rubin and Mr. Ramis, based on a story by Mr. Rubin; director of photography, John Bailey; edited by Pembroke J. Herring; music by George Fenton; production designer, David Nichols; produced by Trevor Albert and Mr. Ramis; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is rated PG. Phil . . . Bill Murray Rita . . . Andie MacDowell Larry . . . Chris Elliott Ned . . . Stephen Tobolowsky Buster . . . Brian Doyle-Murray Nancy . . . Marita Geraghty Mrs. Lancaster . . . Angela Paton
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Groundhog Day: the perfect comedy, for ever Bill Murray called it 'probably the best work I've done' and, 20 years after its release, Groundhog Day can still take your breath away. Its original screenwriter Danny Rubin and admirers such as director David O Russell explain its lasting appeal Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in the enduring comedy Groundhog Day. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Allstar Collection/COLUMBIA Ryan Gilbey
I am holding for David O Russell, the Oscar-nominated director of Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, who has agreed to talk about one of his all-time favourite films: the comic masterpiece Groundhog Day, released in the US 20 years ago this month. (It reached the UK in May 1993.) But the person on the other end of the line doesn't sound like Russell: it's more of a shrill whine, the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard. Then the penny drops.
"Ryan? It's Ned! Ned Ryerson! Bing!" After a prolonged chuckle, Russell drops his impersonation of Groundhog Day's irksome insurance salesman, a minor but intensely memorable character, and explains excitedly that he recently met Andie MacDowell, one of the film's stars. "She came to a screening of Silver Linings Playbook and I was, like: 'Oh my God, you were in one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.' She goes: 'Four Weddings and a Funeral?' I said, 'No, Groundhog Day!' I would give my left arm to have written that fucking script. It's the only movie I think of from that period other than the ones by Quentin [Tarantino]. It makes me mad because I would so like to make a film like that. Oh man, I could go on for ever about that movie …"
Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext /Allstar Collection/COLUMBIA We don't have for ever – isn't that one of the lessons of Groundhog Day? – but Russell happily slips in and out of voices and lines from the movie, his recollections punctuated by wistful sighs. This is what tends to happen when fans of Groundhog Day get together. On its release, the picture, directed by Harold Ramis, instantly took its place alongside long-cherished favourites such as It's a Wonderful Life and Some Like It Hot. It was a hit, if not a record-breaking one – Free Willy made more money that year. It wasn't even the biggest comedy of 1993: that honour went to the Robin Williams cross-dressing farce Mrs Doubtfire, which grossed more than three times as much in the US. But if one of the marks of a great film is that we can barely remember a time when it wasn't in our lives, then Groundhog Day passes that test with ease. It seems to have been with us for ever.
So, too, does its title, which has entered our language as shorthand for any period of intolerable monotony comparable to the one experienced by the misanthropic TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray). Phil is dispatched to the folksy town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual 2 February celebrations, which revolve around a groundhog supposedly foreseeing the exact date of the arrival of spring. "This is one occasion where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather," Phil sneers to camera. But when he wakes the following morning, it is 2 February again. And 2 February it will remain indefinitely, rebooted each day at 6am, until Phil can figure out how to arrest the cycle. The secret, it transpires, lies within him.
Bill Murray interviews the groundhog. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext /Allstar Collection/COLUMBIA The film's timelessness can be attributed partly to its classical redemptive narrative, which has echoes of A Christmas Carol. "The redemption plot is one of the oldest story shapes," says Peter Baynham, the Day Today and Brass Eye writer whose script credits include Borat, Arthur Christmas and the forthcoming Alan Partridge: The Movie. "With so many movies, especially comedies, you can see the bones sticking out – you can see what they're trying to do. But Groundhog Day is such a clever, wonderful ride that you don't notice the joins. It's rare for a comedy to be funny and profound but also popular. Films such as Groundhog Day and Back to the Future sold a lot of popcorn, but they were insanely smart too. That's very inspiring when you're sitting there trying to write a comedy screenplay. Groundhog Day is living proof that it's possible to create intelligent comedy that still has a broad appeal."
Read more Also remarkable is the film's refusal to reveal how Phil came to be stuck in his time-loop: there is no magical fairground machine (Big), no mantra (Shallow Hal), no curse (What Women Want). Nor does it specify the amount of times he repeats the same day. It could be 10 years or a thousand, however long it takes him to memorise the personal histories of Punxsutawney's townsfolk, and to become, among other things, a pianist, an ice-sculptor and a doctor ("It's kind of an honorary title," he shrugs). That radical withholding of information makes it something of an art film in mainstream clothing.
The artist and film-maker Gillian Wearing included Groundhog Day in her all-time top 10 when polled last year by Sight & Sound magazine. Her list included other enigmatic, if less multiplex-friendly, films – L'avventura, The Exterminating Angel, Last Year at Marienbad. "All those films reinvent structure and create a new conceptual framework that makes you understand them," says Wearing. "They share an almost surrealistic vision, and they pose philosophical questions. Groundhog Day is there primarily to entertain, but there are lots of really intelligent ideas in it. It makes me think of [the French philosopher Gilles] Deleuze and his thoughts on how change can arise from repetition. The film follows that to the letter."
Not that the studio pushed the screenwriter Danny Rubin to go big on Deleuze or to make the third act more Marienbad-ish. On the contrary, Rubin was urged to write a Gypsy-curse scene explaining the loop, which Ramis wisely never shot. The mystery has only fortified the film's magic. Its chances of longevity were helped too by a purge on period references. Rubin urged Ramis, with whom he shares a writing credit, to expunge any nods to the 1990s: "You've gotta take all this out," he said, "because this movie is really going to go on for years and years." Compare this with Judd Apatow's films, which are peppered with gags about early-21st century celebrity culture. Parts of Funny People and This Is 40 will be incomprehensible in 50 years' time, whereas our descendants in 2063 will have no trouble understanding Groundhog Day when they download it on to their frontal lobes.
Stephen Tobolowsky (left) with Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Allstar/COLUMBIA/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Speak to any of the film's admirers and one word comes up repeatedly: perfect. "I thought straight away that it was a classic," says Wearing. "It's like a Billy Wilder film: other generations will understand immediately what's so good about it. To me, it's a perfect film."
Russell agrees: "It's perfect in its structure, and its ideas are so profound. Very much like Silver Linings Playbook, it's about someone fighting their demons using all that humble, difficult, baby-steps hard work that it takes, but doing it in such a hilarious way. It shows that until you wake up and get things right, you're gonna live that stuff until you die: the same emotional prison every day. Phil has to go through every incarnation of what he thinks love is until he really gets it."
Like Russell and Wearing, the former Monty Python member Terry Jones also included Groundhog Day in his top 10. "What's so remarkable about it," Jones observes over a pint in a north London pub, "is that normally when you're writing a screenplay you try to avoid repetition. And that's the whole thing here, it's built on repetition. That's so bold. The way they get through it is to short-circuit everything, so just when you think something is going to happen that you've seen before, the film gets to it before you and changes or abbreviates it in some way. I saw it when it came out and it just took my breath away."
Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Alamy It still does. I watched the film again at a London cinema last weekend (on Groundhog Day itself, in fact), where it played to a rapturous sold-out crowd who hung on Murray's every poisonous putdown. ("Probably the best work that I've done," Murray once said of the movie.) His performances since then, from his collaborations with Wes Anderson (including last year's Moonrise Kingdom) to his Oscar-nominated turn in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, each have as their springboard Groundhog Day. Before that, Murray was seen largely as a clown. After it, he was a complex actor with range. "It's the movie he was born to make," enthuses Russell. "It's his greatest role. His cynicism and eventually his sincerity feel so real because he comes by them so honestly. He proves that if you feel it from the feet up, there are no cliches."
If the impact of Groundhog Day is still felt on Murray's career, its influence on cinema in general is ever more prevalent. It legitimised fantasy aspects in mainstream comedy so effectively that stars such as Jim Carrey (in The Truman Show, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty) and Adam Sandler (in Click and 50 First Dates) spent years trying to replicate its formula. Its imprint can be detected on films as diverse as Sliding Doors, The Family Man, Run Lola Run and the recent Safety Not Guaranteed. In 2004, there was an Italian remake, though the best thing about that was the title: È già ieri, or It's Already Yesterday. And Charlie Kaufman has also occupied the same philosophical terrain with films such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (with Carrey again). "Look at everything Kaufman's done," says Russell, "and you'll see that Harold and Danny got there first." Later this year, Richard Curtis will try for the Groundhog Day effect with About Time, featuring a hero who can zip back and forth through episodes in his own life. In one sequence, he refines repeatedly his first night with a new girlfriend until he perfects his technique. Connors, never shy of using supernatural subterfuge for sex, would have approved.
"There have been a lot of messing-with-time movies where you can't help but see the influence of Groundhog Day," Rubin tells me. "There was Source Code, which was like Groundhog Day but with a bomb on a train. I quite liked that. Every time it happens, my friends say: 'You just got ripped off. I hope they paid you.' I'm, like: 'No, it's an homage.' It's not like I'm being erased. It's an honour. I always thought the premise could be explored a million different ways. I welcome all of these explorations; it's fun for me because I like to see how other people play with the idea. Basically it shows how ubiquitous it's become in the culture. It's getting harder and harder now to find anyone who hasn't seen it."
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: Free will, fate
CHARACTERS: Phil (Bill Murray), Rita (Andie MacDowell), Larry (Chris Elliot), Ned (insurance salesman), Nancy (temporary love interest)
OTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR HAROLD RAMIS: National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Multiplicity (1996), Analyze This (1998), Analyze That (2002)
SYNOPSIS: A self-consumed TV weatherman from Pittsburgh, Phil goes to Punxsutawney to report on the famed groundhog residing there. His new producer Rita and long-time cameraman Larry accompany him. A snow storm prevents them from leaving, and, the next day Phil discovers that he is reliving the previous day. As the same day repeats countless times, Phil reacts to the situation in various ways, first becoming depressed and eventually making the best of the situation. He continually tries to court Rita, but is rebuffed each time. When Phil finally transforms into an altruistic renaissance man, Rita falls for him, and the day stops repeating.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus stated the following: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” What kind of actions were within Phil’s control, and which were not?
2. The Stoic solution to the problem of acquiring happiness is to resign oneself to fate and limit one’s desires. What was Phil’s solution?
3. In the bowling alley, Phil asks two locals, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.” Assuming that one’s life is very repetitive, why would the Groundhog-Day-experience prove frustrating?
4. Outside the bowling alley Phil asks the same two locals “What if there were no tomorrow?” One guy answers “That would mean there will be no consequences, there will be no hangovers, we could do whatever we wanted.” In Plato’s Republic, a character named Glaucon describes a mythological ring that makes the wearer invisible, and he speculates that wearers of the ring would thereby do whatever they wanted. From this Glaucon concludes that “the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.” In the Groundhog-Day-experience, would the lines between justice and injustice be equally blurred, as Glaucon suggests?
5. In one scene Phil is dead in the morgue; Rita and Larry are also there identifying his body. This suggests that Phil’s Groundhog-Day-experience is not simply in his head, but happening to everyone else as well. The only difference between his experience and that of other people is that he remembers things. Would the fatalistic theme of the movie have been different if this scene was missing from the movie?
6. As the days go by, Phil progresses through a series of psychological states: confusion, over-indulgence, romantic desire, depression, acceptance, human kindness, intellectual improvement. Which of these would a stoic accept or reject?
I am holding for David O Russell, the Oscar-nominated director of Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, who has agreed to talk about one of his all-time favourite films: the comic masterpiece Groundhog Day, released in the US 20 years ago this month. (It reached the UK in May 1993.) But the person on the other end of the line doesn't sound like Russell: it's more of a shrill whine, the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard. Then the penny drops.
"Ryan? It's Ned! Ned Ryerson! Bing!" After a prolonged chuckle, Russell drops his impersonation of Groundhog Day's irksome insurance salesman, a minor but intensely memorable character, and explains excitedly that he recently met Andie MacDowell, one of the film's stars. "She came to a screening of Silver Linings Playbook and I was, like: 'Oh my God, you were in one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.' She goes: 'Four Weddings and a Funeral?' I said, 'No, Groundhog Day!' I would give my left arm to have written that fucking script. It's the only movie I think of from that period other than the ones by Quentin [Tarantino]. It makes me mad because I would so like to make a film like that. Oh man, I could go on for ever about that movie …"
Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext /Allstar Collection/COLUMBIA We don't have for ever – isn't that one of the lessons of Groundhog Day? – but Russell happily slips in and out of voices and lines from the movie, his recollections punctuated by wistful sighs. This is what tends to happen when fans of Groundhog Day get together. On its release, the picture, directed by Harold Ramis, instantly took its place alongside long-cherished favourites such as It's a Wonderful Life and Some Like It Hot. It was a hit, if not a record-breaking one – Free Willy made more money that year. It wasn't even the biggest comedy of 1993: that honour went to the Robin Williams cross-dressing farce Mrs Doubtfire, which grossed more than three times as much in the US. But if one of the marks of a great film is that we can barely remember a time when it wasn't in our lives, then Groundhog Day passes that test with ease. It seems to have been with us for ever.
So, too, does its title, which has entered our language as shorthand for any period of intolerable monotony comparable to the one experienced by the misanthropic TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray). Phil is dispatched to the folksy town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual 2 February celebrations, which revolve around a groundhog supposedly foreseeing the exact date of the arrival of spring. "This is one occasion where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather," Phil sneers to camera. But when he wakes the following morning, it is 2 February again. And 2 February it will remain indefinitely, rebooted each day at 6am, until Phil can figure out how to arrest the cycle. The secret, it transpires, lies within him.
Bill Murray interviews the groundhog. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext /Allstar Collection/COLUMBIA The film's timelessness can be attributed partly to its classical redemptive narrative, which has echoes of A Christmas Carol. "The redemption plot is one of the oldest story shapes," says Peter Baynham, the Day Today and Brass Eye writer whose script credits include Borat, Arthur Christmas and the forthcoming Alan Partridge: The Movie. "With so many movies, especially comedies, you can see the bones sticking out – you can see what they're trying to do. But Groundhog Day is such a clever, wonderful ride that you don't notice the joins. It's rare for a comedy to be funny and profound but also popular. Films such as Groundhog Day and Back to the Future sold a lot of popcorn, but they were insanely smart too. That's very inspiring when you're sitting there trying to write a comedy screenplay. Groundhog Day is living proof that it's possible to create intelligent comedy that still has a broad appeal."
Read more Also remarkable is the film's refusal to reveal how Phil came to be stuck in his time-loop: there is no magical fairground machine (Big), no mantra (Shallow Hal), no curse (What Women Want). Nor does it specify the amount of times he repeats the same day. It could be 10 years or a thousand, however long it takes him to memorise the personal histories of Punxsutawney's townsfolk, and to become, among other things, a pianist, an ice-sculptor and a doctor ("It's kind of an honorary title," he shrugs). That radical withholding of information makes it something of an art film in mainstream clothing.
The artist and film-maker Gillian Wearing included Groundhog Day in her all-time top 10 when polled last year by Sight & Sound magazine. Her list included other enigmatic, if less multiplex-friendly, films – L'avventura, The Exterminating Angel, Last Year at Marienbad. "All those films reinvent structure and create a new conceptual framework that makes you understand them," says Wearing. "They share an almost surrealistic vision, and they pose philosophical questions. Groundhog Day is there primarily to entertain, but there are lots of really intelligent ideas in it. It makes me think of [the French philosopher Gilles] Deleuze and his thoughts on how change can arise from repetition. The film follows that to the letter."
Not that the studio pushed the screenwriter Danny Rubin to go big on Deleuze or to make the third act more Marienbad-ish. On the contrary, Rubin was urged to write a Gypsy-curse scene explaining the loop, which Ramis wisely never shot. The mystery has only fortified the film's magic. Its chances of longevity were helped too by a purge on period references. Rubin urged Ramis, with whom he shares a writing credit, to expunge any nods to the 1990s: "You've gotta take all this out," he said, "because this movie is really going to go on for years and years." Compare this with Judd Apatow's films, which are peppered with gags about early-21st century celebrity culture. Parts of Funny People and This Is 40 will be incomprehensible in 50 years' time, whereas our descendants in 2063 will have no trouble understanding Groundhog Day when they download it on to their frontal lobes.
Stephen Tobolowsky (left) with Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Allstar/COLUMBIA/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Speak to any of the film's admirers and one word comes up repeatedly: perfect. "I thought straight away that it was a classic," says Wearing. "It's like a Billy Wilder film: other generations will understand immediately what's so good about it. To me, it's a perfect film."
Russell agrees: "It's perfect in its structure, and its ideas are so profound. Very much like Silver Linings Playbook, it's about someone fighting their demons using all that humble, difficult, baby-steps hard work that it takes, but doing it in such a hilarious way. It shows that until you wake up and get things right, you're gonna live that stuff until you die: the same emotional prison every day. Phil has to go through every incarnation of what he thinks love is until he really gets it."
Like Russell and Wearing, the former Monty Python member Terry Jones also included Groundhog Day in his top 10. "What's so remarkable about it," Jones observes over a pint in a north London pub, "is that normally when you're writing a screenplay you try to avoid repetition. And that's the whole thing here, it's built on repetition. That's so bold. The way they get through it is to short-circuit everything, so just when you think something is going to happen that you've seen before, the film gets to it before you and changes or abbreviates it in some way. I saw it when it came out and it just took my breath away."
Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Photograph: Alamy It still does. I watched the film again at a London cinema last weekend (on Groundhog Day itself, in fact), where it played to a rapturous sold-out crowd who hung on Murray's every poisonous putdown. ("Probably the best work that I've done," Murray once said of the movie.) His performances since then, from his collaborations with Wes Anderson (including last year's Moonrise Kingdom) to his Oscar-nominated turn in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, each have as their springboard Groundhog Day. Before that, Murray was seen largely as a clown. After it, he was a complex actor with range. "It's the movie he was born to make," enthuses Russell. "It's his greatest role. His cynicism and eventually his sincerity feel so real because he comes by them so honestly. He proves that if you feel it from the feet up, there are no cliches."
If the impact of Groundhog Day is still felt on Murray's career, its influence on cinema in general is ever more prevalent. It legitimised fantasy aspects in mainstream comedy so effectively that stars such as Jim Carrey (in The Truman Show, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty) and Adam Sandler (in Click and 50 First Dates) spent years trying to replicate its formula. Its imprint can be detected on films as diverse as Sliding Doors, The Family Man, Run Lola Run and the recent Safety Not Guaranteed. In 2004, there was an Italian remake, though the best thing about that was the title: È già ieri, or It's Already Yesterday. And Charlie Kaufman has also occupied the same philosophical terrain with films such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (with Carrey again). "Look at everything Kaufman's done," says Russell, "and you'll see that Harold and Danny got there first." Later this year, Richard Curtis will try for the Groundhog Day effect with About Time, featuring a hero who can zip back and forth through episodes in his own life. In one sequence, he refines repeatedly his first night with a new girlfriend until he perfects his technique. Connors, never shy of using supernatural subterfuge for sex, would have approved.
"There have been a lot of messing-with-time movies where you can't help but see the influence of Groundhog Day," Rubin tells me. "There was Source Code, which was like Groundhog Day but with a bomb on a train. I quite liked that. Every time it happens, my friends say: 'You just got ripped off. I hope they paid you.' I'm, like: 'No, it's an homage.' It's not like I'm being erased. It's an honour. I always thought the premise could be explored a million different ways. I welcome all of these explorations; it's fun for me because I like to see how other people play with the idea. Basically it shows how ubiquitous it's become in the culture. It's getting harder and harder now to find anyone who hasn't seen it."
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: Free will, fate
CHARACTERS: Phil (Bill Murray), Rita (Andie MacDowell), Larry (Chris Elliot), Ned (insurance salesman), Nancy (temporary love interest)
OTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR HAROLD RAMIS: National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Multiplicity (1996), Analyze This (1998), Analyze That (2002)
SYNOPSIS: A self-consumed TV weatherman from Pittsburgh, Phil goes to Punxsutawney to report on the famed groundhog residing there. His new producer Rita and long-time cameraman Larry accompany him. A snow storm prevents them from leaving, and, the next day Phil discovers that he is reliving the previous day. As the same day repeats countless times, Phil reacts to the situation in various ways, first becoming depressed and eventually making the best of the situation. He continually tries to court Rita, but is rebuffed each time. When Phil finally transforms into an altruistic renaissance man, Rita falls for him, and the day stops repeating.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus stated the following: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” What kind of actions were within Phil’s control, and which were not?
2. The Stoic solution to the problem of acquiring happiness is to resign oneself to fate and limit one’s desires. What was Phil’s solution?
3. In the bowling alley, Phil asks two locals, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.” Assuming that one’s life is very repetitive, why would the Groundhog-Day-experience prove frustrating?
4. Outside the bowling alley Phil asks the same two locals “What if there were no tomorrow?” One guy answers “That would mean there will be no consequences, there will be no hangovers, we could do whatever we wanted.” In Plato’s Republic, a character named Glaucon describes a mythological ring that makes the wearer invisible, and he speculates that wearers of the ring would thereby do whatever they wanted. From this Glaucon concludes that “the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.” In the Groundhog-Day-experience, would the lines between justice and injustice be equally blurred, as Glaucon suggests?
5. In one scene Phil is dead in the morgue; Rita and Larry are also there identifying his body. This suggests that Phil’s Groundhog-Day-experience is not simply in his head, but happening to everyone else as well. The only difference between his experience and that of other people is that he remembers things. Would the fatalistic theme of the movie have been different if this scene was missing from the movie?
6. As the days go by, Phil progresses through a series of psychological states: confusion, over-indulgence, romantic desire, depression, acceptance, human kindness, intellectual improvement. Which of these would a stoic accept or reject?
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: Free will, fate
CHARACTERS: Phil (Bill Murray), Rita (Andie MacDowell), Larry (Chris Elliot), Ned (insurance salesman), Nancy (temporary love interest)
OTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR HAROLD RAMIS: National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Multiplicity (1996), Analyze This (1998), Analyze That (2002)
SYNOPSIS: A self-consumed TV weatherman from Pittsburgh, Phil goes to Punxsutawney to report on the famed groundhog residing there. His new producer Rita and long-time cameraman Larry accompany him. A snow storm prevents them from leaving, and, the next day Phil discovers that he is reliving the previous day. As the same day repeats countless times, Phil reacts to the situation in various ways, first becoming depressed and eventually making the best of the situation. He continually tries to court Rita, but is rebuffed each time. When Phil finally transforms into an altruistic renaissance man, Rita falls for him, and the day stops repeating.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus stated the following: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” What kind of actions were within Phil’s control, and which were not?
2. The Stoic solution to the problem of acquiring happiness is to resign oneself to fate and limit one’s desires. What was Phil’s solution?
3. In the bowling alley, Phil asks two locals, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.” Assuming that one’s life is very repetitive, why would the Groundhog-Day-experience prove frustrating?
4. Outside the bowling alley Phil asks the same two locals “What if there were no tomorrow?” One guy answers “That would mean there will be no consequences, there will be no hangovers, we could do whatever we wanted.” In Plato’s Republic, a character named Glaucon describes a mythological ring that makes the wearer invisible, and he speculates that wearers of the ring would thereby do whatever they wanted. From this Glaucon concludes that “the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.” In the Groundhog-Day-experience, would the lines between justice and injustice be equally blurred, as Glaucon suggests?
5. In one scene Phil is dead in the morgue; Rita and Larry are also there identifying his body. This suggests that Phil’s Groundhog-Day-experience is not simply in his head, but happening to everyone else as well. The only difference between his experience and that of other people is that he remembers things. Would the fatalistic theme of the movie have been different if this scene was missing from the movie?
6. As the days go by, Phil progresses through a series of psychological states: confusion, over-indulgence, romantic desire, depression, acceptance, human kindness, intellectual improvement. Which of these would a stoic accept or rejec Search | About | Blog | Archives | Store | Events | Contact
ShareThis Facebook Tweet LinkedIn Email From the April, 2004 issue of Touchstone
Phil’s Shadow Michael P. Foley on the Lessons of Groundhog Day
Last December the New York Times ran an intriguing article about a Museum of Modern Art movie series on film and faith. What attracted the Times to the series was not its pageant of grave Swedish cinema but its opening feature, the 1993 romantic comedy Groundhog Day. The curators, polling “critics in the literary, religious and film worlds,” found that the movie “came up so many times that there was actually a squabble over who would write about it in the retrospective’s catalog.”
The movie, the article went on to observe, “has become a curious favorite of religious leaders of many faiths, who all see in Groundhog Day a reflection of their own spiritual messages.” A professor at NYU shows it in her classes to illustrate the doctrine of samsara (the endless cycle of rebirth Buddhists seek to escape), while a rabbi in Greenwich Village sees the film as hinging on mitvahs (good deeds). Wiccans like it because February 2nd is one of the year’s four “great sabbats,” while the Falun Dafa sect uses the movie as a lesson in spiritual advancement.
Deciphering which, if any, of these interpretations is correct is no easy task, especially since the director and co-writer of the film, Harold Ramis, has ambiguous religious beliefs (he is an agnostic raised Jewish and married to a Buddhist). The commentators also seem wedded to a single hermeneutical lens, forcing them to ignore contradictory data.
A more fruitful approach, I suggest, would involve following all of the clues, clues that lead not only to religion but also to the great conversation of philosophy. Once we do so, Groundhog Day may be seen for what it is: a stunning allegory of moral, intellectual, and even religious excellence in the face of postmodern decay, a sort of Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those lost in the contemporary cosmos.
Typical Modern
Groundhog Day is the story of Phil Connors, an obnoxious weatherman at a Pittsburgh TV station who must cover the celebration of Groundhog Day in rural Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Phil (masterfully played by Bill Murray) is egotistical, career-driven, and contemptuous of his fellow man. “People are morons,” he tells his producer Rita, played by an adorable Andie MacDowell. “People like blood sausage.” Phil, in other words, is the typical product of modernity, the bourgeois man who lives for himself in the midst of others. Rita describes him—and us—well by quoting Sir Walter Scott’s “There Breathes the Man”:
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
By refusing to die to himself, Phil and those like him are doomed to die doubly, triply, innumerably.
The Punxsutawney celebration of Groundhog Day culminates with the town elders consulting a real woodchuck, also named Phil, about the next six weeks. The groundhog sees his shadow, an omen that more winter is to come.
Connors cannot wait to return to Pittsburgh, but trapped by a blizzard (which he failed to predict), he and the crew must stay another night in Punxsutawney. When he awakes the next morning, Phil discovers to his dismay that it is February 2nd—again. The same thing happens the next day, and the next. For reasons that are never made clear, Phil is condemned to live Groundhog Day over and over.
Phil’s situation is unique, yet the movie hints that it is not unrelated to our own quotidian lives. Commiserating with two locals over beers, Phil asks, “What would you do if every day was the same, and nothing you did ever mattered?” The men’s faces grow solemn, and one of them finally belches, “That about sums it up for me.” Phil’s preternatural plight bears a twin resemblance to ours: first, as a symbol for the Fall, with its “doubly dying” estrangement from God and return to the vile dust from whence we sprang; and second, as a symbol for life in the wake of postmodern philosophy.
For the great father of this philosophy is Nietzsche, and the idea that frightened him most was the “the eternal recurrence of the same,” i.e., that even the superior human being must bear the same dreary existence an infinite number of times. Like us, Phil is the modern man who must now confront the hardship of postlapsarian life on the one hand and the metaphysical meaninglessness of postmodern thought on the other.
Indeed, Phil’s various reactions to his enslavement read like the history of philosophy in reverse. Phil is shocked at his own impotence, so much faith had he put in his meteorological training. (“I make the weather!” he tells an unconvinced state trooper.) Phone lines and automobiles prove useless, as do his visits to a doctor and a therapist. All of the Enlightenment’s societal buttresses—technology, natural science, and social science—collapse under the weight of a problem outside the parameters of space and time.
Failure & Happiness
Once Phil realizes that in his Nietzschean quagmire there are no consequences to his actions, he also experiences modern philosophy’s liberation from any sense of eternal justice. “I am not going to play by their rules any longer,” he gleefully announces. His reaction epitomizes Glaucon’s argument in Plato’s Republic. Remove the fear of punishment, Glaucon argued, and the righteous will behave no differently than the wicked. Nineteen hundred years later, Machiavelli, arguably the father of modern philosophy, elevated this view to a philosophical principle.
And Phil embodies it perfectly: Once he learns that he can get away with anything he wants, he becomes Machiavelli’s prince. He unhesitatingly steals money from a bank, cold-cocks a life insurance agent, and seduces an attractive woman.
To Phil’s surprise, however, this life of instant gratification proves unfulfilling, leading him to set his sights on Rita, his beautiful and wholesome co-worker. The name “Rita,” I contend, tells us something about the role she plays in Phil’s life. Rita is short for Margarita, the Latin word for “pearl.” To Phil, Rita is the pearl of great price. We know from Matthew’s Gospel that this pearl is the kingdom of Heaven, but it may also be appropriate to think of it as happiness, since, according to Aristotle, happiness is that towards which everything in our life is ordered.
And so the overriding question of the story becomes clear: What will it take to attain true happiness? What will it take to buy the pearl?
Phil’s initial attempts to win Rita again betray his Machiavellian instincts. Machiavelli contended that it is better for a prince to appear to be virtuous—which fosters in others a gullible trust—than to be virtuous, which hamstrings his actions. And so Phil goes to extraordinary lengths to learn about Rita’s aspirations and then to feign the same. (The logic here is also Hegelian: Injustice is justified in the name of historical progress.) Yet the ruse never works; each night ends with Phil receiving a slap in the face rather than acquiescence to his overtures. The pearl of happiness, it turns out, cannot be bought with counterfeit money.
Phil’s failures lead to despair. At the end of his rope, he now commits suicide—over and over. Yet no matter how often he jumps off buildings or electrocutes himself, he stills wakes up to another Groundhog Day. His poignant awareness of his emptiness recalls the chilling line from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “I went far from you, my God, and I became to myself a wasteland.” Liberation from the divine law initially sounds thrilling, but such freedom proves to be not only hollow, but self-squandering annihilation. As Phil says, “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.”
And so Phil, with nowhere else to go, unconsciously turns from modern philosophy, with its “concentred” individualism, to ancient philosophy, with its praise of the just life as the best way to live. Phil begins pursuing excellence (which in Greek is the same word as virtue), not for any ulterior motive but because he enjoys it. In good Aristotelian fashion, he cultivates moral virtues (e.g., saving a choking victim), intellectual virtues (reading Chekhov), and a proficiency in the arts (playing the piano). And thus Phil starts to become happy, for he is now fulfilling the conditions of happiness identified by the moralists of antiquity: knowing, doing, and loving the good.
Not God
One can also argue that there is a theological dimension to Phil’s transformation. Part of his conversion involves recognizing that there is a God and he is not it. Like most moderns, Phil thinks of himself as (in Freud’s immortal phrasing) “a prosthetic god,” someone who “makes the weather” through his mastery of science. Later, after his unsuccessful suicides, he tries to convince Rita that he is a god, a claim she rejects on account of her “twelve years of Catholic school” (this is the only time in the movie a religion is explicitly mentioned).
But Phil’s conviction evaporates once he is forced to acknowledge the inevitable death of an old beggar whose life he repeatedly tries to save. In the final scene of this subplot, he is kneeling down, vainly administering CPR to the man, when he stops and plaintively looks heavenward. And in an unrelated moment, he indirectly acknowledges God as Creator by reciting the verse, “Only God can make a tree.” God alone, Phil learns, is the Lord of life and death.
And then there is the pearl. On what ends up being the cycle’s last day, Rita is mesmerized by Phil’s now luminous character. As the first item for sale at a fundraising event in which eligible bachelors are auctioned to the highest bidder, Phil generates tremendous interest from the town’s ladies, but Rita grandly outbids them all by offering the contents of her checking account. In a happy peripety, rather than Phil buying the pearl with everything he has, the pearl buys him with everything she has.
Like grace, Rita comes to Phil as a freely given gift; like the kingdom of Heaven, she confers on him an ineffable bliss. Rita’s purchase of Phil is literally a redemption or buying back from the slave block. (As she coos to him later, “You’re mine; I own you.”)
It is only after this redemption that Phil—and Rita—wake up the following day to February 3rd. The seemingly endless recurrence of the same has been broken by a love born of virtue, and the couple is now free to live happily ever after. (Because the cycle is broken by the consummation of love and desire rather than the abandonment of it, the story cannot be seen as an allegory for Eastern religious thought. And because this “eternal” recurrence is terminated by love and classical virtue, it is a refutation rather than an endorsement of Nietzsche.)
Though Phil and Rita’s romance is essential to the plot, it is not, however, the only gauge of progress. Throughout the movie, the groundhog seems to function as Phil’s nonhuman doppelganger. Both are weathermen and they share the same name. Phil suspects a link but wrongly concludes that as long as Phil the groundhog sees his shadow, he will be doomed to relive February 2nd. (This initiates a tragicomic incident in which he kills himself and the groundhog.) But what we eventually come to realize is that it is not Phil the groundhog’s shadow that proves crucial, it is Phil the man’s. As long as Phil wakes up in the morning and sees his shadow, there will be for him more winter, more of the same. But if he awakes without a shadow, he will be given spring, new life.
What is Phil Connors’s “shadow”? It is his vices, his bad habits and sinful ways that detract from and diminish his God-given goodness. The equation of shadow with vice is apposite, since both are, in St. Augustine’s terms, a privation: Shadows are a privation of light, and evil and vice are a privation of the good. Significantly, when one of the townies hears Phil Connors’s name, he teases him with the admonition, “Watch out for your shadow there, pal!” And significantly, the townie’s name is Gus—short, of course, for Augustine.
I should add, though, that the movie is not perfect. Rita’s final “redemption” of Phil, for instance, results in their sleeping together the next morning. (Call it the incense that had to be thrown on the Hollywood fire.) Also, despite promising hints, Phil’s turn to God is underdeveloped and falls short of a full religious conversion.
Purifying the Ground
Nonetheless, Groundhog Day exemplifies genuine progress, from the nadir of contemporary thought to the apex of classical philosophy, from depravity to virtue, from wretchedness to happiness. And perhaps more interestingly, the movie taps into a Christian symbol of which its makers were no doubt unaware.
February 2nd in the liturgical calendar is the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, the feast that commemorates the presentation of her Son in the Temple 40 days after his birth. It was on this occasion that the aged Simeon declared the infant Jesus a “light for the revelation of the gentiles.” Traditionally, candles are blessed on the feast, with a prayer that “just as visible fire dispels the shadows of the night, so may invisible fire, that is, the brightness of the Holy Spirit, free us from the blindness of every vice.”
Simeon’s prophecy led to a folk belief that the weather of February 2nd had a prognostic value. If the sun shone for the greater part of the day, there would be 40 more days of winter, but if the skies were overcast, there would be an early spring. The badger was added later in Germany, but the Germans who emigrated to Pennsylvania could only find what native Americans in the area called a wojak, or woodchuck. Since the Indians considered the groundhog a wise animal, it seemed only natural to appoint him, as we learn in the movie, “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators.”
The ground of Groundhog Day, in other words, is Catholic. And just as our secular celebration of the day unwittingly echoes a deeper truth about the Light revealed to the gentiles, so too does the movie unwittingly point the way back to that truth. And who knows, perhaps Rita, with her twelve years of Catholic school, knew this all along.
The New York Times article to which he refers is Alex Kuczynski’s “Groundhog Almighty,” December 7, 2003.
Michael P. Foley currently teaches in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
“Phil’s Shadow” first appeared in the April 2004 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.
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| Roger Ebert
January 30, 2005 |
Print Page"Groundhog Day" is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.
Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.
The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.
This man is named Phil, and he is a weatherman. In a sense, he feels himself condemned to repeating the same day, anyway; the weather changes, but his on-camera shtick remains the same, and he is distant and ironic about his job. Every year on Feb. 2 he is dispatched to Punxsutawney, Pa., to cover the festivities of Groundhog Day, on which Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, is awakened from his slumbers and studied to discover if he will see his shadow. If he does, we will have another six weeks of winter. We usually have another six weeks of winter, anyway, a fact along with many others that does not escape Phil as he signals his cynicism about this transcendentally silly event.
Phil is played by Bill Murray, and Murray is indispensable; before he makes the film wonderful, he does a more difficult thing, which is to make it bearable. I can imagine a long list of actors, whose names I will charitably suppress, who could appear in this material and render it simpering, or inane. The screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis is inspired, but inspired crucially because they saw Bill Murray in it. They understood how he would be able to transform it into something sublime, while another actor might reduce it to a cloying parable. Ramis and Murray had worked together from the dawn of their careers, at Second City in Chicago, and knew each other in the ways only improvisational actors can know each other, finding their limits and strengths in nightly risks before a volatile and boozy audience. I doubt if Ramis would have had the slightest interest in directing this material with anyone else but Murray. It wasn't the story that appealed to him, but the thought of Murray in it.
The Murray persona has become familiar without becoming tiring: The world is too much with him, he is a little smarter than everyone else, he has a detached melancholy, he is deeply suspicious of joy, he sees sincerity as a weapon that can be used against him, and yet he conceals emotional needs. He is Hamlet in a sitcom world. "Lost in Translation," another film that works because Bill Murray is in it, captures these qualities. So does "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," which doesn't work because Murray's character has nothing to push against in a world that is as detached as he is.
In "Groundhog Day" (1993), notice how easily he reveals that Phil (the weatherman, not the groundhog) is a perfect bastard. He doesn't raise his voice or signal through energetic acting that he's an insufferable jerk. He just is. He draws for his Punxsutawney assignment a patient angel of a producer named Rita (Andie MacDowell) and a good sport of a cameraman named Larry (Chris Elliott). Like television production people everywhere, they're accustomed to "talent" that treats them shabbily; they indulge the egos of the on-camera performers and get on with their jobs, reflecting perhaps that they can do without the big bucks if it means being a creep like Phil.
At 6 a.m. on Feb. 2, Phil is awakened by the clock alarm in his cozy little Punxsutawney bed-and-breakfast. It is playing "I Got You Babe," by Sonny and Cher. He goes through a series of experiences: Being greeted by an old classmate who wants to sell him insurance, stepping into an icy puddle, performing a stand-up on camera in front of the wretched groundhog, which he considers, not without reason, to be rat-like. Phil is rude to Rita and Larry, and insulting to his viewers (by implying they are idiots to be watching the segment). He has no liking for himself, his job, his colleagues or the human race.
All he wants to do is get out of town. He begins to. He doesn't quite make it. What with one thing and another, he wakes up the next morning in the same bed, with the radio playing the same song, and it gradually becomes clear to him that he is reliving precisely the same day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, in his case, doesn't creep in at its petty pace from day to day, but gets stuck like a broken record. After the third or fourth day, the enormity of his predicament is forced upon him. He is free to change what he says and does from one Feb. 2 to the next, but it will always be Feb. 2 for everyone else in the world, and he will always start from the same place. They will repeat themselves unless he changes the script, but tomorrow they will have forgotten their new lines and be back to the first draft of Feb. 2.
One night in a bowling alley, sitting at the bar, he says almost to himself: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and everything that you did was the same, and nothing mattered?" The sad sack next to him at the bar overhears him and answers: "That about sums it up for me."
Slowly, inexpertly, Phil begins to learn from his trial runs through Feb. 2. Ramis and Rubin in an early draft had him living through 10,000 cycles, and Ramis calculates that in the current version he goes through about 40. During that time, Phil learns to really see himself for the first time, and to see Rita, and to learn that he loves her, and to strive to deserve her love. He astonishingly wants to become a good man.
His journey has become a parable for our materialistic age; it embodies a view of human growth that, at its heart, reflects the same spiritual view of existence Murray explored in his very personal project "The Razor's Edge." He is bound to the wheel of time, and destined to revolve until he earns his promotion to the next level. A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says "Groundhog Day" is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, but never mind: They have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."
What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair.
We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.
January 30, 2005 |
Print Page"Groundhog Day" is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.
Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.
The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.
This man is named Phil, and he is a weatherman. In a sense, he feels himself condemned to repeating the same day, anyway; the weather changes, but his on-camera shtick remains the same, and he is distant and ironic about his job. Every year on Feb. 2 he is dispatched to Punxsutawney, Pa., to cover the festivities of Groundhog Day, on which Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, is awakened from his slumbers and studied to discover if he will see his shadow. If he does, we will have another six weeks of winter. We usually have another six weeks of winter, anyway, a fact along with many others that does not escape Phil as he signals his cynicism about this transcendentally silly event.
Phil is played by Bill Murray, and Murray is indispensable; before he makes the film wonderful, he does a more difficult thing, which is to make it bearable. I can imagine a long list of actors, whose names I will charitably suppress, who could appear in this material and render it simpering, or inane. The screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis is inspired, but inspired crucially because they saw Bill Murray in it. They understood how he would be able to transform it into something sublime, while another actor might reduce it to a cloying parable. Ramis and Murray had worked together from the dawn of their careers, at Second City in Chicago, and knew each other in the ways only improvisational actors can know each other, finding their limits and strengths in nightly risks before a volatile and boozy audience. I doubt if Ramis would have had the slightest interest in directing this material with anyone else but Murray. It wasn't the story that appealed to him, but the thought of Murray in it.
The Murray persona has become familiar without becoming tiring: The world is too much with him, he is a little smarter than everyone else, he has a detached melancholy, he is deeply suspicious of joy, he sees sincerity as a weapon that can be used against him, and yet he conceals emotional needs. He is Hamlet in a sitcom world. "Lost in Translation," another film that works because Bill Murray is in it, captures these qualities. So does "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," which doesn't work because Murray's character has nothing to push against in a world that is as detached as he is.
In "Groundhog Day" (1993), notice how easily he reveals that Phil (the weatherman, not the groundhog) is a perfect bastard. He doesn't raise his voice or signal through energetic acting that he's an insufferable jerk. He just is. He draws for his Punxsutawney assignment a patient angel of a producer named Rita (Andie MacDowell) and a good sport of a cameraman named Larry (Chris Elliott). Like television production people everywhere, they're accustomed to "talent" that treats them shabbily; they indulge the egos of the on-camera performers and get on with their jobs, reflecting perhaps that they can do without the big bucks if it means being a creep like Phil.
At 6 a.m. on Feb. 2, Phil is awakened by the clock alarm in his cozy little Punxsutawney bed-and-breakfast. It is playing "I Got You Babe," by Sonny and Cher. He goes through a series of experiences: Being greeted by an old classmate who wants to sell him insurance, stepping into an icy puddle, performing a stand-up on camera in front of the wretched groundhog, which he considers, not without reason, to be rat-like. Phil is rude to Rita and Larry, and insulting to his viewers (by implying they are idiots to be watching the segment). He has no liking for himself, his job, his colleagues or the human race.
All he wants to do is get out of town. He begins to. He doesn't quite make it. What with one thing and another, he wakes up the next morning in the same bed, with the radio playing the same song, and it gradually becomes clear to him that he is reliving precisely the same day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, in his case, doesn't creep in at its petty pace from day to day, but gets stuck like a broken record. After the third or fourth day, the enormity of his predicament is forced upon him. He is free to change what he says and does from one Feb. 2 to the next, but it will always be Feb. 2 for everyone else in the world, and he will always start from the same place. They will repeat themselves unless he changes the script, but tomorrow they will have forgotten their new lines and be back to the first draft of Feb. 2.
One night in a bowling alley, sitting at the bar, he says almost to himself: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and everything that you did was the same, and nothing mattered?" The sad sack next to him at the bar overhears him and answers: "That about sums it up for me."
Slowly, inexpertly, Phil begins to learn from his trial runs through Feb. 2. Ramis and Rubin in an early draft had him living through 10,000 cycles, and Ramis calculates that in the current version he goes through about 40. During that time, Phil learns to really see himself for the first time, and to see Rita, and to learn that he loves her, and to strive to deserve her love. He astonishingly wants to become a good man.
His journey has become a parable for our materialistic age; it embodies a view of human growth that, at its heart, reflects the same spiritual view of existence Murray explored in his very personal project "The Razor's Edge." He is bound to the wheel of time, and destined to revolve until he earns his promotion to the next level. A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says "Groundhog Day" is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, but never mind: They have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."
What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair.
We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.