A GRAND ODE TO SELF- IMPROVEMENT
25 YEARS LATER, GROUNDHOG DAYS STILL PROMPTS US TO MAKE SOMETHING OF OUR TIME
The essential j oke of Groundhog Day is that, for many of us, having to repeat the same day again and again isn’t outlandish science- fiction but a plain fact of reality. That’s why the title so swiftly entered the cultural lexicon: we can relate to the tedium of waking up to the same alarm every morning, of encountering the same friends and strangers with their unvarying small talk, of feeling trapped in a relentless mundane routine. Days just rarely differ — that’s life.
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place,” Bill Murray’s churlish anti- hero Phil asks a Punxsutawney local early into his time-looping cycle. “And every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” The man shrugs. “That about sums it up for me.” Groundhog Day doesn’t ask us what we’d do if we found ourselves in this situation. It asks us if we’d really know the difference.
Groundhog Day was released 25 years ago this week, on Feb. 12, 1993. Over the last quartercentury the film has passed from mildly acclaimed studio comedy to cherished cult classic to, finally, and remarkably, a certified standard of the canon. How? Its basic affinity seems at first to be with the high-concept farce — a broadly comic blockbuster with an outrageous fantasy premise, such as Liar Liar ( chronic fibber can only tell the truth), Shallow Hal ( superficial womanizer sees inner beauty) or What Women Want ( male chauvinist hears women’s thoughts). In Groundhog Day, of course, a surly, self- involved weatherman is caught in an unbreakable time loop, forced to repeat a dull Feb. 2 ad infinitum without apparent hope of escape or change. Because Phil is a narcissist and curmudgeon, having to endure the same lifeless small town and its dopey citizens over and over is torture. Because this is a Hollywood film, we know Phil must avail himself of the situation and change his lousy ways.
In the beginning, Phil avails himself of the situation for his own amusement — if he’s resigned to hell in the form of a consequence- free cycle, he feels, he might as well enjoy the creative possibilities that cycle affords him. So he flirts with women, endeavours to woo his producer Rita ( Andie MacDowell), steals sacks of cash from a security truck, eats and drinks to ludicrous excess. The film enjoys here the creative possibilities afforded by the cycle too: many of Groundhog Day’s funniest jokes involve Phil learning reams of information one day at a time and correcting to account for new facts as he goes, as when Rita orders a sweet vermouth on the rocks on one loop and Phil orders the same in advance on the next (“what a coincidence, that’s my drink too…”), or when, more famously, Phil walks through a diner familiar with every patron and their life’s story, convinced he is a god.
These comic set pieces play on our own efforts to diversify our days — those little strategies each of us come to adopt, some more desperate than others, to add whatever variety we can to our routine. Phil’s early achievements are basically trivial. He doesn’t know how to really use his valuable time — in part because he doesn’t regard it as valuable. There is a startling moment when Phil has persuaded Rita of his condition and the two lie together in bed, flicking playing cards into a hat a few feet away. Rita can’t seem to get the hang of it; Phil scores nearly every time. “It would take me a year to get good at this,” she sighs. “No,” Phil corrects. “Six months. Four to five hours a day and you’d be an expert.” Rita looks at him sadly and asks what we’re thinking. “Is this what you do with eternity?” Is this what you do with eternity.
Is that what we’re doing — learning card tricks, flirting, eating junk? Are we all just wasting time squandering eternity?
The film doesn’t make this accusation lightly. And it takes an outrageous concept, a big premise with a science- fiction spin, to level the idea in terms we accept and understand. Phil over time comes to appreciate the gifts that go along with his curse. He has a lifetime at his disposal: instead of drinking or carousing or frittering the hours away, he dedicates them to diligent study, learns piano and dance, finds out what he can about the people of the city he’s stuck in and resolves to help those in need. And so Groundhog Day becomes at last a parable of self-improvement.
It’s nothing so sentimental as a life lesson, exactly — though its upward thrust toward enlightenment has the ring of truth that inspires in the audience a bout of self-reflection. What the film suggests, ultimately, is that we are each of us stuck in our routines in our own ways, for real, and that all the time we have is ours to do with as we want. We can seek amusement and distraction. Or we can make something of our eternity.