‘Genuinely changed my life’: why Groundhog Day is my feelgood movie

9 hours ago 7

There’s a moment in Groundhog Day that genuinely changed my life: the bit where, noticing that Andie MacDowell has walked into the party that he’s rocking with an up-tempo boogie-woogie solo, weatherman Phil Connors cuts the band with a gesture, takes off his shades, and pivots straight into a soulful rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Has Bill Murray ever looked so cool in a film, before or since? Has anyone?

To be upfront, it took me a while to act on my love of that climactic moment (more on this in a minute) but there’s a lot to love in the prototypical time-loop drama even before you get to the Connors redemption arc. Murray, obviously, gets to showcase his full comedic range, moving from irascible cynic to unhinged hedonist to enlightened altruist and somehow keeping us onside for the entire problematic journey. Stephen Tobolowsky puts in a performance that would steal any other film as Ned Ryerson (“Needle-nose Ned! Ned the Head!”), and MacDowell has never played a more charming character than Rita, Phil’s endlessly patient producer. But really, the whole town of Punxsutawney should have got the best supporting actor nod: it’s the sort of place that you could imagine retiring to eat pancakes every morning in a diner where everyone knows your name. Phil might hate it: I love it, more and more every time I watch.

Groundhog Day is also the first (and still best) example of a film genre that continues to be incredibly watchable, and endlessly re-inventable. It didn’t come up with the idea of a character repeating the same day again and again – Doubled and Redoubled, a short story where a hapless clerk endlessly repeats the same amazing day until he actively hates it, was published in the 1940s, while Star Trek: TNG did a temporal-causality-loop episode in 1992 – but it perfected the format, establishing the structural beats that basically every subsequent film follows. First comes confusion and novelty: not understanding or believing what’s happening, trying the obvious things, then seeing what you can get away with. Slowly, despair emerges, as nothing works and the hero turns to increasingly drastic measures. Eventually, there’s mastery, as our hero learns to effortlessly navigate the endlessly repeating events, whether that means avoiding an attack helicopter (in Frank Grillo’s ridiculous Boss Level), cataloguing otherwise-unnoticed moments of everyday beauty (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things), or giving someone the Heimlich manoeuvre and learning the foibles of everyone in town (Murray).

Usually, there’s a reason why things are happening: sometimes, the hero has to learn quantum physics or solve their own murder to escape the loop. But Groundhog Day sensibly eschews any of this – despite writing a scene where it’s explained that Phil’s been cursed by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, director Harold Ramis and screenwriter Danny Rubin managed to convince studio execs that the loop would feel more compelling if it was never explained, and so it never is. Does Phil finally escape because he’s broken free of the Buddhist cycle of Samsara – the endless process of death and rebirth driven by desire, despair and earthly urges – or because he’s convinced someone to love him? Has he reached peak niceness, or simply accepted his fate? Did God take pity on him, or just get bored? You can make a case for any of those explanations, and then pick a different one on your next rewatch.

But there’s one more reason I love Groundhog Day, and it’s perhaps best explored by Tim Minchin’s wildly underrated musical remake (which also, incidentally, addresses the film’s throwaway treatment of a female character whom Connors tricks into bed, with the surprisingly touching Playing Nancy). The show’s biggest banger is If I Had My Time Again, an overlapping Phil/Rita duet that contrasts all the things the latter wishes she could do with all the things the former actually does (“I’ve always dreamt of learning how to dance” / “Some days I go out without pants”), and it’s a song that still gives me chills whenever I listen to it. Because at some point, I watched Groundhog Day and went: why not? I will never be stuck in this situation, but I do have time, on every ordinary day, to do one or two of the little things that actually improve Phil’s life. I might never learn ice sculpture, but I did learn to play the piano (including, yes, how to play boogie-woogie). I might never be beloved by my entire town, but I can try to be a little bit nicer. And none of us will ever get to relive the same day 10,000 times, but we can all try and be a little bit better, and make life better for the people around us, every day. Sometimes we’ll mess it up. But, for as long as we wake up in the morning, we can always try again.