Movie Review: “Groundhog Day”

June 30, 2009

 

This movie is very high both in quality and in purpose. It has a sweet, but exacting plot: it gets its pound of flesh in the end. It deserves a detailed treatment. Bill Murray plays a sarcastic, resentment-addicted T.V. weatherman who must cover the tiresome (for him) Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, PA. Initially, his character is overwhelmed with contempt for everything human – no mortal foible goes unnoticed, no peccadillo is forgiven. Cynical disdain governs his attitude.

 

Once he gets to Punxsutawney, it’s established that he can’t escape. Groundhog Day repeats endlessly. The same things happen, the same words are spoken. He lives the same day over and over. Only he knows it’s happening, only he remembers the previous cycles. He has been chosen by fate for this trial because of his repeated encroachment upon decency, and Groundhog Day becomes the venue of the courtroom since he has become a groundhog himself in his blind tunnel-vision and cave-like life of chewing on others. (His name is Phil, just as the official groundhog.)

 

Interestingly, in ancient Greek myths, an abiding theme of many stories was the purification the soul undergoes in the travails of psychological suffering. The main moral text of this movie is precisely this unfolding of Phil the Weatherman’s suffering, and his various reactions to it. He can’t be allowed to leave the nightmare until he has earned it and gone beyond.

 

Back on the first day in Punxsutawney, as the crew of three (Phil, Andie MacDowell the producer, and the cameraman) had finished its work, and was starting out to return to Pittsburgh, a blizzard starts. Phil gets out of the van to talk to a state trooper. “What’s going on?” Phil asks. The trooper responds with the utmost in stern replies: “Nothing’s going on! I’m closing this road! You can go back to Punxsutawney or stay here! What’s it gonna be?” Phil has been found guilty – caught in his getaway. You will not be allowed to diss Punxsutawney and then just take off. Thus starts the Eternal Recurrence of the Same for poor Phil the Weatherman.

 

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche developed a concept he called “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” Put briefly, it was a gloomy test: could you live your life over again, the same details, infinitely many times? Of course you couldn’t, I’ll help you out here. That’s why it’s the supposed supreme test for Nietzsche of life-affirmation. The only way to approach the task would be to free yourself completely of all and sundry resentments, and thus you will have maxed your will-to-power, baby. Nietzsche saw the human race as shooting itself in the foot with its pettiness.

 

Now, Phil the Weatherman has been put in exactly this test of overcoming resentment, disdain, and contempt. He can’t leave Groundhog Day until he so overcomes. But he has been put into this trial by his own attitude, it’s a self-imposed catastrophe. The course of the movie spins out his various attempts to escape.

 

First he has fun with the situation, once he figures it out, by stealing money, driving crazy, trying to snag some free tush,etc. He also finds he can set himself up in previous cycles for the subsequent cycles: in other words, since only he remembers the cycles, he can blatantly seek useful info from people for use against them in the next cycle. But his wittiness mostly goes awry – he rarely hits a home run because his attitudes are obnoxious and off-putting. So, in despair after awhile, he tries to commit suicide. It turns out he can die in a current cycle, but then he’s magically alive again at 6:00am the “next” day, the new repetition of Groundhog Day. Nothing he does matters or has meaning since he has put himself outside the code of decency.

 

But eventually, as he notices things and remembers them from the previous cycles (in order to navigate better in the current cycle), he also begins to notice the suffering of others, prompted in this by his own suffering. He turns to good works. For example, he buys an old homeless failure a humongous dinner, and later even gives him mouth-to-mouth when the old man collapses in the snow. Phil’s emotions have evolved from the self-absorbed to the noble. He starts to use his not inconsiderable talents and powers to enrich others’ lives. They are enormously grateful to be taken seriously by such a man, and also prove themselves quite capable of appreciating his elite ability.

 

Finally, the new sincerity impresses Andie MacDowell’s character, and they become lovers again. The first time, though, she had been swept away fatefully and had disappeared at pumpkin time, 6:00am, when the clock radio alarm went off, playing Sonny and Cher’s “I got you, babe.” The song was meaningless to Phil, alone in bed. It was just another cycle beginning, another Groundhog Day. But now, this second time, 6:00am arrives, and she’s still there. It’s not Groundhog Day any longer, since fate, life, and the Furies have allowed him now to move on from the nightmare. He has paid his debt with the currency and coin of decency and sincerity.

 

This movie has a real redemption on offer, as did “Memoirs of a Geisha,” given that the protagonist has to go through real trials, with all the human mistakes made, before reaching true life. This is in contrast to the epically abysmal crap of “The Da Vinci Code,” where the protagonists are mollycoddled by the script into believing themselves victims of an arbitrary totalitarian society that they must overcome with their badass “courage.”

 

The cleverness of “Groundhog Day” is that the plot allows Phil to do things differently in each of the successive cycles, keeping alive the idea of new moral choice. This movie is funny all the way through, too, another bit of cleverness: if Phil was funny only when he was a jerk, and boring when he became a good man, we’d have a problem. The point of this movie is not that people are never contemptible, but rather that a life of petty, posturing superiority is a lie beneath all of us.

 

 

Tony Downing