Is This What You Do With Eternity? (Groundhog Day (DVD))

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Groundhog Day (DVD)
Date:	01/08/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Bill Murray, no exposition

Disadvantages: Andie MacDowell

Groundhog Day boosted the career of Bill Murray, as well as reminding viewers about Four Weddings and a Funeral's Andie MacDowell, in pretty much her final major role before she decided to spend the rest of her career making age-defying adverts about shampoo and face cream. Its plot is well-known, but mis-quoted. A jaded weather reporter is forced to re-live Groundhog Day over and over again.

Most reviews will mention something about 'until he gets it right' - but interestingly that's not something that's ever actually mentioned in the film itself. Seriously, go and watch it.

A review of this film by a non-American is always going to be of interest, as I realised when I looked at various reviews of the film all over the internet. I knew nothing about the whole Groundhog ritual thing until I saw the film, and I had no idea that the tradition was actually genuine until I read the reviews. And this puts me, perhaps, in a better position to appreciate the film than all the people who complained that it wasn't filmed in the real Punksatawney...

So many reviews fall into the trap of comparing the film's setting to the real Punksatawney (or wherever), and fail to truly come to terms with the material. Judging by the reviews, Groundhog Day is viewed in the US as a romantic comedy based around a quaint rural tradition. In the UK, it's viewed as a romantic comedy with a twist of magical realism. In France, it's praised as a masterpiece of modern philosophy that takes daring liberties with Hollywood formula. Seriously. I once saw it at a Bordeaux film festival alongside Stalker (Tarkovsky) and Le Mepris (Godard).

The French adore the film for the risks it takes with characterisation. Every implication of reliving a day is explored, from the practical (avoiding people you know in advance to be irritating) to the criminal (picking up a sack of cash you know will be briefly unattended). Phil is frequently a terribly unlikeable character. However, I think they too should really be looking in a different direction.

Ultimately, the film is a portrait of a single man, Phil Connor the weatherman. Each successive day allows us to see a different element of the same man, and Murray should have received far greater recognition for the immense emotional range he was required to cover. Although, like Phil himself, the film contains much which is cynical and jaded (the ease with which he picks up a young woman with just two or three pieces of information about her), it is ultimately a fairly warm and humanist work, stripping away each layer of the man until we come to the warm fuzzy centre of love and virtue at his core.

To begin with, Phil seems frozen. His conversation is cynical and unthinking, nothing that happens seems to affect him in any way. On his second day, this surface is blasted away, to be replaced by confusion. Already we can see a real human being in the character. He attempts to disguise this for a large part of the film by trying to turn his repetition to his advantage, stealing, drinking, screwing and doing whatever he feels like, and trying to con his way into the affections of his producer, Rita (MacDowell).

When he starts to realise the futility of this course of action, despair takes over. We see several suicide attempts, made all the more chilling in this supposed romantic comedy by the fact that even as he jumps from buildings and steps in front of vehicles, the blank despair in Bill Murray's face makes it clear he has little hope it will work.

What all these replayings of the same day teach Phil is that he can't fake his way through life without engaging himself emotionally, and a clear sign of this is that he eventually wins Rita not only through selfless acts of heroism, but also through developing an artistic streak in ice sculpting and piano playing. From this point of view, the beginning of his redemption is probably the scene playing in the snow when he falls down beside Rita for the second time, and shuffles to get as comfortable as before. A moment lost in time, impossible to regain by calculation.

The film really is a showcase for Bill Murray's immense range, and is probably up there with Ghostbusters and Lost in Translation as one of his finest pieces of work. For me, Andie MacDowell is a bit of a weak link as the love interest as she just never seems interested enough to capture Phil's attention so completely.

In a masterstroke story-telling decision, we never learn why Phil relives this one day for so long. He's not in a beyond-death coma, and no guardian angel is trying to reform him. Every day that we see could easily be the 'real' one. The implications of the ending are ambiguous. Nothing in the town ever changes. Strange American countryfolk practice their insane tradition with a giant hamster as they have done for years, with the result that winter lasts longer. All around we are shown people striving to make every day the same, apparently even the man who has genuinely achieved this.

Ultimately, what the film shows is not any kind of 'seize the day' message, or anything about God entering our lives (I did sneer quite unashamedly at that one, I'm afraid), or even how one man has to 'get it right' one day. What it shows, very clearly, is that Time never changes. We merely change through Time. The instability of our basic identities is thrown into sharp relief by demonstrating how much one person can change their character in just twenty-four hours.

Plus there's a really funny bit when Phil stuffs a whole piece of cake in his mouth in one bite.

Summary: Time never changes, we merely change through time.