Movie Review - Groundhog Day

It’s Cold Out There: The Lessons of Groundhog Day

Movie review by Fr. Rand York

“You’re not a god, Phil. Take my word for it. This is twelve years of Catholic school talking.” -Rita

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a conceited, self-centered, rapacious TV weatherman from Pittsburgh who is assigned to cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. He thinks the world revolves around him, and so this movie does just that. There is not a scene in which Phil Connors is not the central figure. The film moves through Phil’s narcissism to hedonism to nihilism to despair to purpose to redemption. The first wake up call to his egocentricity comes in the form of a blizzard he failed to predict, and Phil “I Make the Weather” Connors finds himself on the receiving end of poetic justice when he gets smacked in the head by a snow shovel.

The story is premised on Phil waking up each morning to the same day as the one before. Every day is Groundhog Day, February 2, and Phil finds himself trapped in a cycle he does not understand and has no idea how to turn off. Punxsutawney becomes Phil Connors’ own personal Twilight Zone.

Michael Foley, in his brilliant film review “Phil’s Shadow,” makes a number of perceptive observations on the names used in the movie. Connors and the groundhog are both named Phil (and are both employed as weather forecasters). Rita is a nickname for Margarita which is Latin for “pearl,” making her the true “pearl of great price” in Phil’s life. Foley even notes that the local, who upon learning Phil’s name warns him to look out for his shadow, is actually named Gus, a most appropriate moniker for someone delivering such an Augustinian message.

NARCISSISM AND HEDONISM

            Upon the discovery that for the foreseeable future he will be waking up to the same day, Phil begins to try to make sense of the situation. He asks Ralph (Rick Overton) and Gus (Rick Ducommun), with whom he spends an evening at the bowling alley, what it would mean if every day was the same and nothing you did ever mattered.  While Ralph replies in comic despair, “That about sums it up for me” Gus recognizes that actions would no longer carry consequences and that, “We could do whatever we want!”

            So Phil turns to a life of pure hedonism, beginning with a breakfast of junk food at the Tip Top Café during which he explains to Rita (Andie MacDowell) that he no longer worries about his health or anything else. The other bookend of this new carefree life is a one-night stand with Nancy Taylor (Marita Geraghty), an attractive local woman he has singled out for seduction.

           

NIHILISM AND DESPAIR

            Every morning, Phil wakes up to the same radio commentary: “It’s cold out there.” And for Phil, it really is. Regardless of how many or what kind of connections he will make that day, by tomorrow they will all be forgotten, and this is the worst part of Phil’s experience. He really is alone. Whatever warmth of human companionship he may experience is fleeting, and ultimately unreal. It’s cold out there, and Phil finally acknowledges it in a broadcast in which he notes that it is, “cold and grey and will last the rest of your life.” Phil tries to destroy the message he so hates by destroying the messenger (in this case the bedside clock-radio), over and over and over again.

            He then tries to stop it by stopping the groundhog: “There is no way this winter is ever going to end as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow every day. I don’t see any other way out. He’s got to be stopped, and I’ve got to stop him. For Channel 9 News, this is Phil Connors.”

            Phil kidnaps the groundhog and leads a merry chase to the local rock quarry, all the while putting the groundhog in front of him at the wheel and telling him not to drive angry. The chase ends with the two Phils driving over a precipice to a fiery death.

            Needless to say, Phil Connors awakens to yet another Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, and proceeds to court death by toaster, truck, belltower, etc., ending up at the end of the day in the morgue to be identified by Rita and Larry (Chris Elliott), and at the beginning of the next morning right back where he began. As he confides to Rita, “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.”

            In a weird way, Phil is finally experiencing what everyone must to be saved…the need to die to self (Romans 6:5-11). One of the most successful songs by the band Petra followed this theme, entitled: “Killing My Old Man.”          

            Dante portrayed the Devil on a block of ice, the place of lifeless cold where there is no more becoming. Punxsutawney (where “it’s cold out there”) has become for Phil that place of no more becoming. As he kills himself (repeatedly) Phil destroys the barriers to becoming, and begins a journey that takes him out of the land of easy vice and into the world of hard-won virtue.

PURPOSE AND REDEMPTION

            Phil finds everything he has done to be meaningless, discovering for himself the emptiness described in Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity…There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 1:11)

Having reached a dead end, Phil turns to the pursuit of something real…he begins to pursue Rita. The first evening of their courtship is replete with them dancing to the aptly titled: “You Don’t Know Me,” and ends with Rita responding to Phil’s protestations of love with: “You love me; you don’t even know me…I could never love you because you could never love anyone but yourself.”

            The first time she slaps him, she does so with the explanation, “That’s for making me care about you.” Like a lab rat, Phil learns by experience, day after day after day, slap after slap after slap.

            Phil emerges into a life of purpose, beginning with piano lessons and learning to sculpt ice, and moving on to developing his best report ever from Gobbler’s Knob (Larry: “You move me, man”), saving a little boy falling from a tree (“You’ve never thanked me!”), fixing a flat tire for a car full of old ladies, saving Buster from choking, and playing piano a la Ray Charles at the evening gala. It is at the end of this “purpose driven life” that Phil finds himself on the auction block, subject to bidding by the ladies of Punxsutawney. Rita, the only lady present who is not a Punxsutawney local, jumps in with her own bid, eclipsing all the others by offering everything she has (specifically $339.88). Once Rita, the pearl of great price, has herself purchased Phil, the evening culminates in an ice sculpture of her face, crafted by Phil.

As Phil’s humility increases, so does Rita’s receptiveness.  Rita becomes Phil’s salvation, but on her terms, not his. She is unattainable until Phil sees her as someone to be cherished rather than conquered. No matter how hard he tries, Phil cannot receive what he so desperately needs until he no longer lives for himself. Not until then is he ready for Rita, and that is when she chooses him.

PHIL: “What are you doing here?”

RITA: “You’re mine; I own you.”

The parallel is strong here as an image of Christ buying us with everything he has and the church receiving us with everything she is. As Paul reminds us, “You have been bought with a price.” (I Corinthians 6:20)

The final scene plays with our expectations by playing “I Got You Babe” the song to which Phil hopelessly awakens every morning. But this time, it’s different. Every time before, the song starts playing with the line, “Put your little hand in mine…,” something Phil has been trying to do with Rita throughout the movie. This time, it begins with, “Babe. I got you babe.” Foreshadowing? I think so, and in a very immediate way. Phil has finally “got you babe.” He has got not just Rita, but the pearl of great price…his own salvation. They both wake up in bed together, having slept the night away in innocence, and Phil becomes playfully passionate. Rita asks him why he wasn’t like this the night before, and he responds that, “Yesterday was a very long day.” From the standpoint of sex in the movies, this is one that Hollywood gets right.

An earlier version of Danny Rubin’s script (the second revision by Harold Ramis) included a rather interesting alternate interpretation of Groundhog Day, given by Phil Connors live from Gobbler’s Knob:

PHIL: Groundhog Day, February second, also known as Candlemas Day or the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, the day Mary first came to the temple for ritual blessings following the birth of the infant Jesus, and celebrated since the Middle Ages by the sacramental lighting of candles. Hence the old Scottish couplet which long predates the American groundhog tradition: "If Candlemas dawns bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year."

(Larry whispers an aside to Rita.)

LARRY: Is he making this stuff up?

RITA (riveted): Shhhhh.

For some reason, this piece was deleted from the final screenplay. Perhaps Ramis believed he had already given enough of a nod to Christianity in Rita’s earlier comment about twelve years of Catholic school, and did not want to feel pressure from other religions clamoring for equal time. Still, it is a pity this scene never made it into the movie.

Just as Phil experiences the same day again and again, learning something new each time, a viewer can experience this film again and again, learning something new each time. Few movies are able to pack into a space of less than two hours as much as this one does, and a decent review of it would have to be book-length.

“Teach us to count the days; teach us to make the days count.”

-Chris Rice

©2011 Rand York