1993 101 min. Rated PG.
“Well, maybe the real God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he’s not omnipotent. He’s just been around so long he knows everything.”
If you haven’t seen Groundhog Day, now is an excellent time. It’s a legitimate American classic and your education is not complete without it.
Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a jerk. He treats people like garbage. He whines about his job. He demands special treatment. Phil is a weatherman at a small-time news station in Pittsburgh, and when he’s assigned to cover Groundhog Day at Punxsutawney, PA (the home of the famous groundhog), his childish reaction is par for the course. But the day after the broadcast, Phil wakes up and realizes that it’s Groundhog Day – again. And again. And again. Unable to escape or reach out to his oblivious coworkers, Phil struggles to come to terms with his new reality as he slowly falls in love with Rita (Andie MacDowell), his new program manager.
According to director Harold Ramis (speaking on the DVD commentary), Phil spends 10 years trapped in Punxsutawney, though apparently Ramis thought about having him spend 10,000. Wolf Gnards has a pretty good breakdown (to which Ramis actually responded, crankily, with a claim that Phil spent 30 or 40 years stuck in Groundhog Day. The Heeb article is offline but please do check out Wolf Gnards’ side of things.) Stephen Toblowsky, who plays annoying insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, claimed that Ramis referenced Buddhist principles in connection with the original 10-millennium concept. My own personal estimate is that Phil must have spent a couple hundred years reliving Groundhog Day, but I’m neither a math major nor a famous Hollywood bigwig (alas) and I will not presume to duplicate all this somewhat insane effort. Suffice it to say that Phil is stuck in a philosophical prison for one hell of a long time. If people could be punished for being immature assholes, this is exactly the kind of conceptual place they’d be.
Phil’s the ultimate narcissistic idiot. By his own admission, he doesn’t even like himself. Stuck in a universe where he is his only real company is tantamount only to the torture of realizing that the people upon whose attention he thrives can’t really interact with him. They could die, declare love, agree to marry each other, acknowledge him with negative or positive reinforcement in any way, and none of it means anything at 6:00 a.m. when the day resets. After a lifetime of objectifying his coworkers, after a career of feeding on the spotlight, Phil finally gets to be the star–the only person in the room. The crowded vacuity of his own life is thrown back at him full force and his acceptance is both delicious and realistic.
But Phil’s obviously not being actively confined so that he can “learn a lesson.” He tries this in various different ways–respecting Rita, breaking the law, saving an old man, developing interests–and it never works. Phil is released when he finally accepts his status and stops struggling. Buddha would approve (so would Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; it seems significant that “Phil” is not only the ever re-occurring groundhog’s name, but that it is in fact short for “Philosophy”).
One of the things I like most about Groundhog Day is that Phil’s entrapment remains absolutely unexplained. (In early versions of the script, Phil’s predicament is manufactured by a magic-using ex-lover with a grudge. I think it was a good idea to leave this out. Human involvement in a temporal event of this magnitude would have been cheesy and un-magic-realistic, and the implications for any greater philosophy – the essence of what makes this a great movie – would be lost.) The eternal Groundhog Day is not an intelligent act of a god, benevolent or otherwise. It happens to Phil like a sinus infection might happen to anyone else–in other words, randomly. This could happen to anyone. It’s akin to a meteorological event. We can describe it–even make a movie about it–but understanding is simply out of the question. It’s too big. It’s too strange. That it happened to a man who purports to predict the unpredictable, to control the uncontrollable, is positively Greek.
Most of the film was shot in Woodstock, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) with the enthusiastic support of the locals. It’s located only about 45 miles from Bill Murray’s actual hometown of Wilmette, which may be one reason he seems to fit into the scenery so naturally. Murray nails his role. This was probably the third or fourth time I’ve seen the film and again I was amazed at how well he depicts Phil’s reaction to his situation. Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin and John Travolta were all considered for the role, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Murray in the lead role (apparently everyone else was “too nice”–Ramis should have been more careful what he wished for–by the end of filming, he and Murray had fallen out so badly that it took 10 years for them to repair their friendship). The role of Rita was originally supposed to be for Tori Amos, but I think that Andie MacDowell does a great job. She’s sincerely effervescent and sweet without being saccharine or unbelievable. Phil and Rita are really the only two characters in this film. In Punxsutawney of the eternal Groundhog Day, nobody has any semblance of free will except Murray and the people with whom he interacts, those being primarily Rita.
Phil’s contempt for “the rat” Punxsutawney Phil mirrors his contempt for himself. Indeed, at the opening of the film, Phil’s about as useful as that groundhog: he’s a nice PR gesture to make people feel better about something outside of their control. He has no other identity, but he deludes himself that he is important and powerful. He is himself a rat in a maze of his own construction.
It goes without saying that Groundhog Day is a classic. It is exquisitely written, brilliantly acted and solidly directed. Very few movies manage to actually talk about something, much less make any kind of a profound statement, all the while avoiding the trap of pretentiousness (of course, many movies try).
If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you have seen it, watch it again. If you’re sick of it, then go read Euripides, watch it again, and call me in the morning.
