Deborah Lipp

Groundhog Day (1993) 10/10
Self-centered weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) travels from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney to report on the Groundhog Day festivities. When he wakes up the next morning, though, it is still Groundhog Day. And every morning thereafter, it is Groundhog Day. While the day is new to everyone else, Phil knows he is living the same day over and over, and gradually comes to know every moment of his one day by heart.

Why, you may ask, have I never seen Groundhog Day? It’s simple, and gives great insight into the functioning of my feeble mind: I thought I already had. See, I really loved Caddyshack. And in Caddyshack, Bill Murray plays a golf course groundskeeper who is having an escalating war with a groundhog (or woodchuck or gopher or something). So then, people would say to me “Have you seen Groundhog Day?” And I’d say “The one with Bill Murray and the groundhog” and they’d say “Yes” and we’d agree that it was funny and there you are.

So about two or three years ago, I’m at my mom’s for a holiday or a party or something, and my brother and my sister are in the den watching something on TV and I come in and say, “Whatcha watching?” and they say “Groundhog Day” and I look, and it is Not. Caddyshack. And I say “The one with Bill Murray and the groundhog?” And they say yes and I watch another couple of minutes and Still. Not. Caddyshack. So I say “Isn’t this the one with the golf course?” and they, having known me a long time, figure out my problem and ‘splain. So I leave the room because now I want to see the movie from the beginning. And now I finally have.

So, yes, it’s as good as everyone has ever said. In fact, even having heard how wonderful the movie is, it still managed to surprise me.

Groundhog Day is a funny movie, with the kind of cute-witty lines you expect from Bill Murray (“This is one of those times where television truly fails to capture the excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather“). But it is the process of discovery that makes the movie special. As he lives the same day, over and over, with every detail not in his control repeated exactly, he goes through a series of reactions to it.

First is disbelief, and then an attempt to escape, to fix it, to get out. Soon enough, he moves on to actually living in the situation. What happens if there’s no tomorrow? Well, one thing is that there are no consequences to what we do today. Phil begins to play. He fulfills fantasies, he runs wild. Nothing he does changes the repetition of the day. Get yourself jailed for drunk driving, and you still wake up in your bed & breakfast on Groundhog Day. Insult someone, make love to someone, get drunk with someone, and you still meet them for the first time the next Groundhog Day, and every Groundhog Day. A lot of this stuff is very funny; the concept is a comedy gold mine.

But after all the comedy in it, all the fun, all the excitement, has been wrung dry, it’s still Groundhog Day, and Phil begins to despair. It is impossible not to notice that this is, after all, our lot in life. We can burn out on having fun, and here’s life, still here. We can despair, and that doesn’t change things either. It is not surprising that Groundhog Day often turns up on lists of “spiritual movies.”

Director Harold Ramis has said:

At first I would get mail saying, ‘Oh, you must be a Christian because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian belief.’ Then rabbis started calling from all over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the Buddhists! Well, I knew they loved it because my mother-in-law has lived in a Buddhist meditation centre for 30 years and my wife lived there for five years.

I think the joy of Groundhog Day is that it is both silly and very thoughtful. You certainly don’t have to take a spiritual message from the movie to enjoy it, but you will definitely be wondering about the implications the next day.