By Bob Clark
Note: In hindsight I should’ve rerun this last weekend and saved the Picnic at Hanging Rock for now, but I expected to be writing up some noirs playing locally that turned out cancelled due to inclimate weather in the Tri-State region. Whatever– Phil was stuck in Punxatawney for well over a week due in no small part to another blizzard, to say nothing of perfect storms in time and space. So we’ll just go for this for now.
Late in Peter Weir’s underrated Fearless, there’s a scene where Jeff Bridges, newly transformed from a mild-mannered San Francisco architect into a passionate bon vivant by the divine intervention of a catastrophic airline crash, violently unplugs his son’s video-game system (a TurboGrafx-16, if memory serves), protesting the cavalier attitude that the boy’s game (Splatterhouse, I think) puts forward about death. In real life, Bridges insists, there are no such things as “continues” or “extra-lives”– just one great big “game over” for the rest of forever. It’s a funny and meaningful scene for any number of reasons, not the least of which being how Bridges himself played a game designer turned video-warrior in Steven Lisberger’s Tron, but mostly for how it exposes the central fallacy of mainstream gaming in its depiction of life-or-death adventures. Because like it or not, the man is right– in real life, there are no second chances, and not just from the big stuff like death. Indeed, most of us would probably write off the consequences of life’s end if we were given just one opportunity to go back and redo some smaller, more intimate moment of our time on Earth. Whether it’s the girl that got away, that job you never got or even that ball you couldn’t hit like Casey at the bat, there’s no shortage of regrets built up over a lifetime’s worth of pruning at our own personal gardens of decision trees.
The problem with games of any ilk, digital or otherwise, is that you can always find a way to erase your past mistakes in ways that just aren’t possible in life– all you have to do is reload a past quicksave, use that last 1-up, or just call “mulligan”. That’s the problem with games, but that’s also the magic, as well. Some of the best video-games have known how to explore this territory, in their own odd ways. Sometimes they introduce crucial decisions into the matrix that can’t be so easily overwritten during the course of gameplay– whether it’s Solid Snake unable to withstand Revolver Ocelot’s torture and save the captive Meryl or Andrew Ryan’s ill-begotten offspring giving into the temptation of harvesting a Little Sister in the underwater dystopia of Rapture, there are plenty of games whose designers cleverly structure savepoints and moral choices in rather uncomfortable ways, forcing the player to live with their actions rather than going back in time and editing their mistakes, like so many Marty McFlys or Docs Brown. Sometimes, however, we see games that do not so much avoid the fallacy of gaming-revisionism as they do embrace it, making the player’s natural instinct to rewrite the past not just a feature of the game but a central tenant of its design, itself. Probably the best example of this (or at least the most well-known) would be from the experimental Legend of Zelda entry Majora’s Mask, released in 2000, which put Shigeru Miyamoto’s iconic Link on a three-day mission to save a parallel world from impending destruction, in which he must constantly travel back in time and relive the same three days in order to accomplish his quest within the limited time-span. Upon its release (and lukewarm reception), the game was often compared in the gaming press to Groundhog Day, which had only been around for seven years but had already gained a surprising popular embrace from moviegoers, film critics, philosophers and religious leaders around the world for being something more than just a mere comedy. It became one of those rare catchphrase movies were merely stating the title would be enough for people to understand its premise, and more importantly a movie with a premise that was worth embedding into pop-cultural ubiquity to begin with.
As directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the screenplay after Danny Rubin’s original script, the film doesn’t appear to aim terribly high, despite the altitude of its concept. At first glance, it seems just another well-meaning, likable vehicle for Bill Murray to ply his trade as a sarcastic, egotistical clown who slowly but surely learns the value of putting up with all the other dumb schmucks who get in his way. That was the standard character arc for Peter Venkman in both of the Ghostbusters movies, the paranormal scientist who treated his research into ESP as an excuse to hit on blondes and only took interest in his colleague’s research into the afterlife once they hit upon the idea of doing it for money. It was repeated with a startling meta-clarity with Richard Donner’s modern take on Dickens in Scrooged, where Murray’s exploitative television head-honcho found himself visited by three ghosts to teach him the error of his yuppie ways in the midst of his live Christmas-Eve production of A Christmas Carol starring Buddy Hackett and Mary Lou Retton. That movie had its moments– it was funny, fitting with Murray’s anarchic Saturday Night Live roots and contained its own kind of authentic urban pathos, updating the Victorian English classic to a more contemporary Manhattanite context, and one that especially jabbed at the consumerism and corporate greed of the Reagan years. But there was something a little too on-the-nose about it, the way that all repurposings of the Dickens tale tend to be when divorced from their original surroundings. It was a Christmas comedy trying too hard to pattern itself after what had already come before, and as such could never really establish itself as a modern classic in quite the same way The Nightmare Before Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street or especially Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, whose angelic third-act twist was worthy even of the creator of old Ebenezer himself.
Earlier efforts like Ghostbusters, Stripes or even Caddyshack all offered much more authentic uses of Murray’s comic gifts, all while showing the potential he had to play a thoroughly populist, American caricature of down-on-his-luck hardship and stuck-up-his-ass contempt. In any of his slob-versus-snob laughfests, he could very easily occupy both roles at once, giving you the satirical thrills of pointing a crooked finger to snicker at all kinds of sacred cows and institutions while at the same time providing enough of a narrative beginning-middle-and-end for him to change into one of the good guys by the final reel. Yeah, he’d slack off, roll his eyes and make fun of you right in front of your face for most of the picture, but eventually he’d grow a conscience and put in a good day’s work, after all was said and done. No matter if he was breaking the rules or living up to them, he represented very much the same kind of unsentimental, working-class romantic ideal that guys like Humphrey Bogart or Steven McQueen did, except in the realm of comedy instead of noir or action– a hero of the underdog, us-vs-them spoof genre. It’s one of the reasons why you look at Scrooged and for a little while wish it was a better movie– yes, it’s got a wonderfully biting kind of satire that’s pitch-perfect for the holiday season, but the whole surrounding context of Christmas and Dickens’ structure is far too formulaic to feel anything other than phony. Though Donner did a good job of displacing much of that patterned feeling with its self-aware nature, there’s only so much you can do with the three-ghosts set-up before a sense of knowing fatigue sets in– it’s already been preordained that the Scrooge figure’s heart is going to grow three sizes and rescue the Cratchits from a fate worse than poverty, so what’s the point of paying too much attention?
As with all remakes, unless you’re willing to take chances with the source material and deviate far off track, there’s really little point in putting in too much effort to begin with. For once, Murray’s lazy mannerisms feel less like those of the character, and more like his own, sleepwalking his way through so many underdone potatoes. This is why Groundhog Day means something special, even before you get to its own supernatural themes, because it’s essentially telling exactly the same kind of Murray-esque comedy take on a good natured holiday spirit, only with one key exception– it has nothing to do with Christmas. Indeed, many have called the film a kind of secular equivalent to Dickens’ or Capra’s takes on the season, a winter’s fable with its own kind of jaded curmudgeon who learns at great lengths the value of people, generosity, and all that other bullshit. Like his best comedies, it manages to communicate that positive message with a great deal more weight than other likeminded efforts thanks to the way it indulges in meaner streaks for long periods throughout. Every Murray comedy has a big, bull’s eye of a target for all his blue-collar humor to be pointed at– Caddyshack‘s country club bluebloods, Ghostbusters‘ city bureaucrat creeps, even Rushmore‘s elite prep-school cretins, where Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson wrote what might be the defining monologue for exactly this kind of us-vs- them mentality that permeates the comedian’s work (“Take dead aim at the rich boys, get them in the cross-hairs and take them down”).
In Groundhog Day, however, the target seems to be fairly innocuous, nothing more than the small-town spirit of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s annual festival to determine whether or not Phil the Groundhog has seen his shadow. The townspeople are etched in an odd combination of rustic, country charm and outright dorkiness in their enthusiastic embrace of this utter charade of a holiday. It’s hard not to react to all the dumbfounded citizens with their empty pleasantries and god-awful polka music with just the same kind of barely restrained contempt that Murray’s TV-weatherman greets them upon his arrival to cover the festival alongside Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliot. Truth be told, all the comedic targets of the movie are fairly large, and hard to miss– top-hatted local politicians, bald and nerdy insurance salesmen, Sonny & Cher– each of them something of a softball pitch to a major-league pro like Murray, all mere paper tigers to his seasoned hunter. The lack of a challenge is part of the joke, of course, as his character doesn’t even have to put up much of an effort to mock his way through every obstacle without them even being aware of it. It’s also part of the deeper, and more immediately apparent message– yeah, these townspeople, their music and celebrations are corny and ridiculous for any number of reasons, but they aren’t hurting anybody, so why bother getting so worked up about it? The implicit answer made apparent throughout the film is that anybody who’s so determined to pin the tail on a donkey big enough to be found blindfolded has to be a fairly big ass themselves, and more to the point is probably somebody who doesn’t really enjoy their own company too much more than anybody else. The more you target that many sitting ducks, the likelier it is you’re just going to wind up pointing the Elmer Fudd hunting rifle in your own direction.
And that’s just what happens, at great length, after the movie’s deceptively clever high-concept kicks in and begins the glorious game. Like any modern 3D adventure released for Nintendo, PlayStation or Microsoft platforms, Groundhog Day clearly establishes the closed set of its playing grounds right from the start. Attempting to leave the town after delivering a half-hearted coverage of Phil and his shadow, Murray and his co-workers find themselves blocked by a sudden storm, something he has previously dismissed on the air in his role as a televised meteorologist (instead of fog, which keeps most post 16-bit games from having to display too many polygons at once, we get snow). Weathermen function as a kind of oracle for the boob-tube, themselves another criminally easy comedy target for all their shortsighted predictions, and perhaps it’s appropriate that a man unable to correctly guess the future finds himself doomed to keep repeating the same yesterday over and over again until he learns to live in the present tense. Ramis uses a handful of cleanly repeated gags and scenes (that dopey song and dopier banter on the radio, those kindhearted idiots throughout town) to establish the temporal dilemma Murray faced better than any longwinded exposition possibly could. We don’t need some externalized moral figure to condescendingly explain the rules to us– there’s no ghost of Jacob Marley or wingless Clarence to explain to Murray’s self-absorbed weatherman that he’s going to keep repeating the same day until he learns to become a better person. All we have to do is watch with delight as he reacts to each incident with a new stage of incredulous grief, learning the limits of this rule-set at the same pace that he does, the same way you might follow a computerized avatar during a tutorial mission. Like all the best games, Groundhog Day teaches you how to play on its terms without resorting to holding your hand and dumbing things down for you. That’s one of the reasons it’s good that so many of the well meaning rubes in town aren’t that hard to beat– like the little goombas littering an early Super Mario Bros. level, it pays to keep your challenges easy while you’re still trying to get your players to clear the hump of a learning curve.
All that repetition of key phrases and routines gives so many of the townspeople a programmed feel, as well– they’re like the NPC’s found throughout the villages in any given RPG spouting off the same pre-scripted lines over and over again, even after you’ve met certain conditions. You could say that Groundhog Day amounts to one giant Zelda-style chain-quest once Murray gets his moralistic bearings, scrambling across town to meet the various demands posed by each character, helping them out as best he can. They provide an excellent stomping ground for Murray’s characteristic sarcastic anti-hero to mock throughout the film– like the repeated threats and obstacles found in similar trapped-in-a-snowglobe stories like Lost and The Prisoner, they turn the movie into a set of variations on a theme, recycling a format as many times as is possible and necessary in order to get the maximum potential out of a premise before it wears out its welcome. The shallow characters also provide a nice contrast for Murray and MacDowell, who are the only people in the film developed well enough to stand-out amidst the pre-scripted crowd, a little like two real people finding one another in an MMORPG filled with nothing but AI-bots. She’s the only one who strays from her predetermined script as much as he does, the only one who poses a real challenge to him both as a moralstic homespun girl and as a plot-device in the script. That spontaneous, spitfire character doesn’t just manifest in her dialogue or performance, but in the way that both function in the film as elements of change in the fixed system that Murray finds himself trapped in. Early on, Ramis cleverly (but by no means subtly) introduces her as a ghostly apparition on a TV-studio monitor, wearing a blue jacket against the weatherman’s blue-screen. Whereas Murray himself was introduced there as an empty-hearted ass gesturing in front of a blank canvas (a clear-sky tabula rassa, if you will), she is rendered as a kind of Mother Earth, her face and hands floating on a map of the United States. With that pleasant twang in her voice, she isn’t just a country girl, but a manifestation of the country itself.
So it’s no wonder nearly all Murray’s attempts to game the system and use the day-after-day repetition of Groundhog Day to his advantage begin and end with MacDowell. Watching him play out the same evening bit by bit over and over again to learn more about her character and thus look all the more impressive to her each successive time is like observing a gamer play the same level again and again, memorizing the landscape and locations of enemies and power-ups in order to achieve and ever-higher score, to speed-run the obstacle course in record time and as few slip-ups as possible. It’s some of the funniest stuff in the movie, but also the most telling of Murray’s character at his most egotistical, selfishly exploiting the Twilight Zone scenario he’s in that’s supposed to be teaching him how to to stop being such a jerk in the first place. But like a truly deep game, he isn’t restrained from all this bad behavior, or even really punished for it. There’s no voice of God booming down from the sky scolding him for eating so many apple-pies from the tree of knowledge, but an even more telling, even more frightening silence. It’s a game that gives zero feedback for the choices it doesn’t want you to make, one that only recognizes the right decisions, and puts the onus on the player to figure out what must be done next. It takes a long time before Murray is able to get all of that rule-breaking out of his system, testing the boundaries of the game’s conditions regarding romance, social behavior and even death until he finally knows the town’s layout and patterns by heart. He’s allowed to go on as many selfish and self-destructive phases as he wants until he finally wises up on his own accord and begins to put his temporally displaced activities to good use, performing enough good deeds over the course of a day to earn himself a whole uniform’s worth of Eagle Scout merit badges. By the end of the film, Murray has learned Punxatawney’s movements and patterns just as much as a reader of Ulysses comes to know those of Dublin on Bloomsday (which is fitting, seeing as Groundhog’s Day doubles as James Joyce’s birthday, something I’d like to think he would’ve found mildly amusing, were he aware of it).
And it may seem just as corny and sentimental as everything else in the town to see Murray turn into such a do-gooder by the end, but the over-the-top level to his generosity and the comic treatment of it helps keep it all in character. Like the Grinch sledding down from the top of Mount Crumpit or Scrooge himself making a big show of buying the biggest bird on display in the grocer’s window, his meteoric rise to morality has to be just as big and showy as the proud display of his misanthropy was beforehand. Like any piece of well-worn Americana, Groundhog Day may go to great lengths to criticize much of what’s wrong, or in this case merely foolish, about this country, but in the end it only does so out of a genuine love for it. The same can easily be said for how it treats mankind in general, with only the national landscape as its stand-in microcosm– yes, we’re all sort of silly, naive, superstitious and grumpy at any given time, but there’s also great generosity and creativity in our character, as well. Ours is a spirit that can make time move forward once again after repeating itself ad infinitum like a record skipping on a broken player– all it takes is for one broken man to open up his heart and accept that the world and its people aren’t nearly as stupid and worthless as he thinks they are (himself included). And though it’s all delivered in an easy, Reader’s Digest version of pop-mythology that’s prevalent throughout American sci-fi and comedy of the 80’s and onward, there’s something about the unpretentious holistic embrace of the film that gives it a zen kind of quality, making its message almost universal to people of all faiths, or lack thereof. Finally, this is why it’s so important to have a holiday movie that doesn’t have anything to do with a real holiday, because it articulates the religious experience without any actual religion to get in the way, and does so with a sense of humor that would probably get kicked out of any house of worship anyway. That all-embracing approach is deepened thanks to how well the narrative works as a game in play, with rules that are clearly illustrated and easy to understand even if the objectives are never stated outright. It all helps Groundhog Day become a film that isn’t merely a modern classic, but one that deserves the recognition without that contemporary signifier in front of it, and a work that ought well to work no matter how one tells it. Just as Dickens’ Christmas Carol has found itself adapted countless time for the stage and screens both big and small, I’d like to think that Ramis’ film could find itself rearticulated for any number of mediums, we well. Not long ago I recall reading that Stephen Sondheim was interested in making a Broadway musical based on it, and that’s not a bad idea. But if somebody up there likes me, then please, let me do the video-game.
This is a extremely good comparison, actually, one me and my brother thought of many years ago when we were watching the movie after a long season of PlayStation (playing the masterpiece Final Fantasy VIII), we could say that we were in the videogame mood, but you just nailed it perfectly.
Loved the videogame references, specially the Majora’s Mask one, one of the few N64 games I tolerate (that includes the playful Pokemon Stadiums and Snaps, I’m not a big Nintendo fan, but I’m a sucker for Pokemon and RPGs). I thought for a moment that you’d talk about the Sands of Time in Prince of Persia, since I think it’s one of the most impressive examples about how the “try again” aspect of a videogame can be turn into an excess, and at the same time be entertaining and plot useful.
But the movie is just amazing, is among my favorite comedies, and everytime Groundhog Day comes I wish it’s not me I have to live it once again and again. But I could watch this movie again and again, I love it.
Coincidentaly, James Rolfe just posted his review of this movie on youtube, and even if he is sorta of a videogame conosseur, he doesn’t mention the quality you saw in the movie, but he gives an interesting look at it, specially regarding what happens after every “game over”.
“The Sands of Time” is good with its rewind feature, and it’s a clever game-over inversion. I suppose I associate it with the way the same thing was done in “Braid”, later on, giving you the chance to rewind past mistakes. I definitely should’ve mentioned that, perhaps, but you do it so often in the game that you kind of lose track of it.
Oh I see the reason why this is topical. hehe. This is my favorite Bill Murray film. It’s like an extended speculative Twilight Zone episode with a good deal of charm. Great essay.
I could never understand the praise that this film has recieved over the years since its release.
To me, this is another in keeping with the kind of playful humor that Ramis and company made so successful with crap like GHOSTBUSTERS. It’s a nift y premise made totally invalid, at leas to me, by dumbing it down with humor. I have only wondered, in the many unfortunate times I have had to sit through this film, how much better the premise would have benefitted had this story been rendered serious. The idea of a timeloop has been done, and far better mind you, on shows like STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION and, hell, even in comedies like BACK TO THE FUTURE (the second film is STILL the best).
Most would rally around GROUNDHOG DAY as they see it solely as an ingenious vehicle for Bill Murray to let loose with his brand of smar-ass wit and put-down… However, it’s almost immediately following GROUNDHOG DAY that the comic actor would finally find his footing and apply his well known aura, plus real acting, to a character that would reap full benefit of his presense and timing. As we all know, that film was Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE and, since that film, the actor/comedian has been contributing fine, well rounded performances (LOST IN TRANSLATION, THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS, THE LIFE AQUATIC, BROKEN FLOWERS).
I like to think of GROUNDHOG DAY as that flm that passed to Murrays hnads and made the actor stop and think and say: “God, this is absolutely the last time I do shit like this!”
I can’t stand this film…
On the nicer note…
Bob has, as always, written a superlative piece and I wish I could find the same enthusiasm he did with this material….
I’ve said to myself that anyone who doesn’t like Ghostbusters isn’t a human being.
I’ve found one, and may I ask… are you a human being?
Well, that’s debatable Jaime.
I was created in a test tube in a laboratory high on a snow swept mountain in the Carpathians (Dracula was a neighbor). Once I had grown to full length, I was turored to speak and walk upright where I ravashed many villages and ate a small child every day to keep my calcium levels up.
I moved to the states via a crate on an old exploration boat and found my permanent nest here on the docks of New Jersey where I frequently slither over to New York to eat the tires off taxi cabs, destroy skyscrapers with my tentacles and find nourishment from sucking the electricity from local power plants on Staten Island.
Jaime, he’s obviusly a clone of Viggo, the scourge of Carpathia, the sorrow of Muldavia. You know who we gotta call…
This is so ballet.
“This is so wizard, Ani!”
Dennis, remember that Murray starred in stuff like “Larger Than Life”, “What About Bob?” and “The Man Who Knew Too Little” after “Groundhog Day”, to put it into context.
Personally, while I like his roles in the Wes Anderson films, I think that Murray’s new forray as a semi-serious dramedy actor is at least somewhat a waste of time. I despise “Lost in Translation”, and have little to no reason to watch “Broken Flowers” (never was much of a Jarmusch fan, myself). They do a good job of showing that a minimal amount of Murray is entertaining, yes, and allow him to flex the dramatic muscles he’s wanted to for years. Back in the 80’s he was dying to get out of his comedic shell, playing a somewhat watered down Hunter S. Thompson in “Where the Buffalo Roam” and taking on Sommerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge”. Even so, his best gifts are in comedy, and the farther away his roles take him from that, the less interesting they become. Even in the modern-day “Hamlet”, he got to clown it up a little as Polonius.
As for the humor “dumbing down” the sci-fi premise– to an extent, I’d argue it’s the other way around. The emphasis on using the time-loop to deliver jokes forces Ramis and Murray to let the temporal wackiness speak for itself, rather than over-explain it as stuff like TNG and BttF did even at their best moments. There’s precious little exposition in the film– most of the time, we simply watch events repeat themselves with different outcomes and get the jist of what’s going on as Murray does. It’s all show, instead of tell.
I like the second BttF movie, too, but it’s kind of funny just how disastrously wrong it gets the speculative science of time travel. You’ll get a kick out of this site, Dennis: http://www.mjyoung.net/time/index.htm
I happen to love QUICK CHANGE, it’s rather inventive for a genre film (Heist film), and it has some fantastic funny moments.
I always thought it was odd that there were trailers to “Quick Change” and “Driving Miss Daisy” on my old VHS of “Roger & Me”. Very odd set up to Michael Moore’s GM takedown.
I hate this film as I do nearly every film that Murray has been in prior to RUSHMORE.
There are one or two rare exceptions and WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM is one of them. However, RUSHMORE, still Murray’s best turn, finally provided a vehicle that perfectly balanced Murray’s ability to act ad create a viable character with his smart-ass wit and pretend stupidity (Murray’s characters are smart but like to play dumb). Since RUSHMORE he has delivered one terrific performance after another and most in films by Wes Anderson. I’m not a huge fan of Anderson, mind you, and I think he never reached the high water mark guite like he did with RUSHMORE, however he has provided Murray with a wide range of characters that allow Murray to broaden his repertoire and all of this brought him to LOST IN TRANSLATION. Like the film or lump it, actually I stand on the fence with it, it did provide Murray with a helluva dramatic turn that was lighter on his smarmyness than ever before and it rervealed a sentimental side f his persona that every film he’d done prior missed out on.
As for GROUNDHOG DAY, what can I say????? I just didn’t buy it. I found it lightweight, directed with a pedestrian attitude and NOT funny at all. I’m probably in the minority on this one but, hey, that’s just me.
As for GHOSTBUSTERS. Lightweight fare with no visual ingenuity and probably would have been so much better had John Belushi lived to play the role of Venkman which, as everyone knows, was specifically written for him.
I’m not a fan of the sophmoric antics of the SNL and National Lampoon team. I liked ANIMAL HOUSE, but just liked it. VACATION hada a few terrifically whacked out moments but drasgs on forever and ever and CADDYSHACK is just a giant mess that feels slapped together without any rhyme or reason.
If you asked me which film directly asscoiated with the SNL team worked completely then my vote would go to THE BLUES BROTHERS. That film is a gleefully anarchic bit of insanity that lobs everything including the sink at you so fast you nary have a minute to realize how stupid it all is.
After that, I think my favorite film starring an SNL team member would be P.T. Andersons PUNCH DRUNK LOVE that showcased a riveting little serio-comic turn by Adam Sandler.
First of all– I can’t picture anybody other than Murray in the role of Venkman, and especially not Belushi, even if the role was written with him in mind. Call me crazy, but I never quite cared for him, the somewhat lazy demeanour he brought to his roles. Murray may play a smartass underachiever often enough, but he’s a purposeful one. And anyway, Murray apparently ad-libbed half his lines, at least, in “Ghostbusters”, so he really made the role his own.
Furthermore, while I’m no fan at all of Ivan Reitman, he found exactly the right tone for that first film. He took the way too ambitious and fantastical script written by Ramis and Ackroyd and brought it down to earth, gave it a much more urban, contemporary feel. It’s a great love letter to Manhattan, above all, and has an authentic patina of grit and atmosphere from cinematographer Llazlo Kovacs. Elmer Bernstein’s score is fun as hell, too– jaunty, jokey and spooky as well. It’s one of those rare supernatural comedies that’s both funny and at times scary without either aspect getting in the way too much. All that detailed attention paid to occult history is really fascinating. It’s a fun movie, all around.
As for “Punch Drunk Love”– PTA’s movies are all worthless up until “There Will Be Blood”, in my opinion. Showy, god-awful pretentious crap that thinks it can impress you with its smorgasbord of film school tricks. I don’t even need to factor in Adam Sandler to round out the quotient of my displeasure with that movie to less than zero.
As for “Groundhog Day”, beyond what I’ve already said– I actually kinda like the “pedestrian” mis-en-scene that Ramis uses in the movie. He doesn’t draw attention to the camera, and indeed would be wasting any efforts like that in the folksy, unremarkable setting. It’s a spartan direction that allows the meaningful imagery to happen naturally, with as little intervention from the filmmaker as possible. The movie speaks for itself in lovely little moments like the blue-screen shots in the TV studio, or the repeated angles of the radio-clock. It’s a plainspoken film, and all the better for it.
Wow Dennis I’m really surprised you don’t find something deeper to this film. It has incredible amounts of meaning and yes it’s funny, but it’s so moving and poignant and filled with moments of truth that often stand out even more than the comedy. I find it has a lot in common with the somewhat sad melancholic comedy that Chaplin and Keaton often dabbled in. It’s not just the stone face that Murray has going for him, it’s the realness to him and this makes the comedy so sad in a way that speaks to me.
Great Essay Bob! Loved it!
I once started to write a piece on this film where I argued that it’s one of the great Atheist films of all time, or at the very least the most honest indictment of the ‘love’ notion where two people are ‘meant for one another’ (seriously think about it: Murray must go through a lifetime of ‘learning’ tasks such as playing the piano, reciting poetry in able to ‘click’ with a woman he adores. This is an incredibly pessimistic and unrealistic notion). It’s profound in a metaphysical way which often slips below the surface because all the antics Murray is so brilliantly doing. Bob doesn’t miss any of these ideas, but goes more for the video-game ‘start over’ bent, which is an interesting, and not really that different of an idea to the one I’m alluding to. (you could also make an almost Kierkegaardian argument that the film works on his ideas of Human Stages (man starts an individual with personal needs and goals, then makes the next stage to family man where his ideas become those of others and he’s in service to his family, then finally– and few reach this– he attains transcendence when he’s able to give him self to god [or something as large as that]. Murray has the initial stages down pat, even when he’s having the reoccurring days [like the funny scene where he’s aloof and eats donuts by the mouthful], then he begins the quest for higher levels and meanings).
Can’t believe anyone could not like this film (or not see anything deeper from it), it’s so populist but also so profound and rather artful. Nice essay Bob.
Jamie– I don’t think the movie is quite as pessimistic about love as you might think. Yeah, Murray goes to great lengths to click with MacDowell on every level, reciting poetry, ordering her favorite drink, building a snowman with her. And it all fails, rather miserably. That’s the portion where he’s going about things superficially, trying to game the system for nothing more than his own selfish needs, and it plainly doesn’t work. Murray’s only able to “get the girl” when he pretty much stops trying so hard, and simply lives his life in the moment without appearing to care that much about whether or not he wakes up on February 3rd. Yeah, he learns piano and does good deeds throughout the town, but that’s just the icing on the cake– he’s become the gamer trying to get 100% completion on a level before moving on, a Mortal Kombat-style “Flawless Victory”. The piano playing, the book reading– he’s not doing that to impress her. He’s doing it for himself, taking advantage of the time-loop without taking advantage of somebody else in the process.
Anyway, he only learns to “adore” MacDowell after spending so much damn time with her day after day, anyway, and even then he still retains some of his sarcastic spark, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously.
Yes, but he stop’s trying so hard only after he’s lived an entire lifetime of failing inside a 24 hour span. It’s pessimism to it’s core, it just wraps it up with an optimistic final: he stops trying and it works out.
Oh and the audience is left wondering how the relationship is going to go when he doesn’t get the infinite ‘do overs’ to accompany his every move, (sort of like ‘Knocked Up’ where you know the relationship isn’t going to work out) thus dumping him where he started. Though slightly improved.
It’s pessimistic I believe, and don’t read that as a negative, I think it’s the films strength.
But I do agree, he does end up improving himself, which is the real message of the film (but again we’re being told to become a complete person you either [a] devote your entire life to it, or [b] get stuck in a metaphysical time loop. It’s brilliant, but how many people want the isolation and scalpel like analysis he attempts?).
When it comes to the self-improvement angle, I think the time-loop really only has to function as a metaphor for living in the moment. Once you get past the wish fulfillment angle of being able to live without consequences and redo past mistakes, it’s something that forces Murray to simply enjoy whatever time he has for its own worth, without attaching an agenda to it. He gives up all the plans he had in previous walkthroughs (the life of the future tense) and stops fighting against the impermanence of his actions (the life of the past tense) and just embraces the now.
Do you need a metaphysical temporal anomaly to do this? No, that’s confusing the metaphor for a literal reading– as Campbell would put it, reading poetry as prose. Maybe you do have to spend your whole life in this way to become “whole”, or just accept that fact that we’re all works in progress until the end, and stop worrying about it. At any rate, most of us don’t have to start as close to the bottom as Murray’s character does here.
It’s not pessimism, really, just a kind of mythological logic. Dorothy had the power to go home all along, after all. And there may only be a slight improvement in Murray’s character by the end, but I see that as optomistic. He’s learned a greater deal of generosity, tolerance and curiosity than he had before, but he hasn’t fundamentally changed that much. His identity remains the same.
More to the point on the metaphorical nature of the metaphysical loop– for me, the key scene of the film here is Murray in the bowling alley with the two boozy blue-collar bozos. “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was the same, and nothing you did mattered?” “Well, that about sums it up for me.” Plenty of people are already living “Groundhog Day” existences, without having to resort to some temporal existential crisis. It’s one of the reasons the movie speaks to so many.
Yes, that is a key scene. But not my key scene, but I unfortunately haven’t seen the film in more then 2 years so I don’t recall what mine was/is (but I’ve seen the film at least 10 times probably). I do recall when I starting writing an essay on it, one scene was my focus… damn if I can remember which one though. Unfortunately, as I’d like to add it to the discussion.
I will say, of all the late 80’s/90’s existential comedies, “Groundhog Day” bothers me the least in ethical terms. Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life” is a movie I have biiiiiiiig problems with, despite enjoying. It’s basically a big endorsement of yuppie self-centered egotism. No such thing as sin anymore, other than not doing what you want and being a greedy douche.
I would be interested to know what your “key scene” is, Jamie. I also find a lot reverberating through the last diner scene, where Murray bursts out the life stories of everyone around him, who as far as they know have never spoken to him before. “Maybe the real God isn’t omnipotent. Maybe he’s just been around so long, he knows everything.”
Great. I actually think that and another like that was it. The explicit God reference is key. You’ve made me desire to see the film again asap to confirm and add more to the discussion. I’ll have to return in a few weeks.
Pehraps it’s the start of that scene, where he’s listing off his litany of deaths/suicide-attempts to MacDowell, sounding an awful lot like Rasputin? Either that or it’s the earlier scene where she’s listing the traits of her ideal man, and he’s gently mocking them (“This is a man we’re talking about, right?”).
By the way, not to unduly promote other pieces I’ve written on the site, but I’ve always wondered what your reaction would be to Evangelion, Jamie. You’ve expressed interest in some of the other anime I’ve written about, and out of all of them I’d think that this one would be right up your philosophical alley.
I’d say the same to you, Jaime, but considering that we’re both of the same gaming-generation ilk, I’ll assume that you know of it, somehow.
I’m not familiar with that one Bob (the anime, not the essay I mean). I’ll read your essay the first chance I get and check the show out accordingly.
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was the same, and nothing you did mattered?” “Well, that about sums it up for me.” Plenty of people are already living “Groundhog Day” existences, without having to resort to some temporal existential crisis. It’s one of the reasons the movie speaks to so many.”
Bob, yes and I think this is what really elevates this film is this examination of depression, pointlessness, Godlessness etc. It’s incredibly deep stuff and the comedy comes off as so sad in this way. I think it’s one of the great films of the 1990’s, comedy or otherwise.
I am leaving the house now for Manhattan, but I just wanted to drop in and say that this is a great thread and that GROUNDHOG DAY has always been a favorite of mine. I hope to return to say some a little more substantial.
This was a great piece on a good film. Loved Groundhog Day upon it’s release and still do today, in reterospect it’s a shame Ramis lightened up everything about the initial spec script.
Danny Rubin once said in an interview he always get star-trek and twilight zone timeloop references thrown at him by psueds looking to over-analyse the time/space continuum but he says his only jumping off point of inspiration was Christmas Every Day by William Dean Howells
Nice find, Finch. That’s very in keeping with the more down-to-earth tone of the movie. It’s sci-fi, but a more homey brand of it.
Personally I’m glad that Ramis toned down Rubin’s draft as much as he did. From what I’ve heard, the original was good, but a little heavy on the high-concept. Rubin began the story in the middle, with a flashback to Murray’s character on the first day (thus spoiling us the chance to acquaint ourselves to the time-loop at the same pace as him, and further identify with him), and even eventually had MacDowell’s character admitting that she’s caught in the same thing (do they each remember one another’s actions? are they on parallel or perpendicular loops?), which to me is pushing the idea a bit too far. I think that Rubin’s draft even flat-out stated that Murray lived something like several hundred years in the loop, something that’s only implied in the final film.
Would Rubin’s version have been more obviously intellectual, edgy and easier for cynics to swallow? Perhaps, but it also would’ve robbed it of the mainstream embrace that’s allowed it to become one of the most universally beloved existential movies of the 90’s. It’s like a domesticated version of a Charlie Kaufman script, shorn of all of its most virulent condescending attitudes.
Great piece and great discussion on a great movie. Between this & World on Wires (playing a lot of catch-up today) you really showed you can nail the engaging intro. Though I don’t understand many of them (the most I ever owned was a blue Game Gear, and all the games I had were based on favorite movies), I quite enjoyed the gaming references too.
Good choice to re-run.
Inclement weather?
Geez, you got that right. We are in the throws of a powerful blizzard, which is sue to increase in intensity within the next two hours. We could have about 18 inches of snow by morning. I am praying we don’t lose power, what with some severe wind expected during that span.