Groundhog Day 9781838713041, 9781844570324

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Acknowledgments With thanks to Anne Billson, Cat Ledger, Kim Newman, Diane Sizer, Matthew Sweet, Ben Walters, Rob White, and especially Danny Rubin. For help with research, thanks to Keith Brooke, Sheila Johnston, Edward Lawrenson, Tod Lippy, Richard A. Lupoff, Brian Robinson, Alison Watson, and also to the staff of the BFI Library. And thank you, as ever, to my family. FOR ROSIE AND BARNEY, WHO LOVE THIS MOVIE

Before and after

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1 A Funny Film In Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy (1998), 11-year-old Marcus resolves to lift the spirits of his mother, who has recently survived a suicide attempt. He orders dinner and tramps off to the video store, where he despairs that death is implicated in every title on every shelf. Finally he settles with relief on Groundhog Day (1993). The back of the box was right: it was a funny film. This guy was stuck in the same day, over and over again, although they didn’t really explain how that happened, which Marcus thought was weak … But then the film changed, and became all about suicide. This guy was so fed up with being stuck in the same day over and over for hundreds of years that he tried to kill himself. It was no good, though. Whatever he did, he still woke up the next morning (except it wasn’t the next morning. It was this morning, the morning he always woke up on) … Why wasn’t there any warning? There must be loads of people who wanted to watch a good comedy just after they’d tried to kill themselves. Supposing they all chose this one?1

It is easy to sympathise with Marcus. Groundhog Day does, after all, promise to be a straight-shooting movie: no kinks, no curveballs. It takes an established clown (Bill Murray), albeit one with a uniquely unsavoury kind of charm, and an effervescent former model (Andie MacDowell), and lets them loose in a folksy American small town – that safest of cinematic playgrounds where the equipment is heavily supervised, and there are no sharp corners or abrasive surfaces. The picture is co-written and directed by Harold Ramis, known for his part in irreverent mainstream entertainment (co-writing Meatballs [1979] and Ghostbusters [1984], directing Caddyshack [1980] and National Lampoon’s Vacation [1983]). More reassurance. But as Marcus discovered, Groundhog Day is a devious beast. At first glance it seems to be a typical narrative of redemption. Murray plays Phil Connors, a television weathercaster who finds himself repeating indefinitely one drab day in the milk-and-cookies town of Punxsutawney,

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Pennsylvania: no matter what improprieties he has perpetrated in the previous 24 hours, or how definitively he has annihilated himself, he is returned intact to his bed each morning at 5.59 a.m. He has come to Punxsutawney with his producer, Rita Hanson (MacDowell), after whom he half-heartedly pants as though it were a contractual obligation, and a cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott), whom he baldly despises. There, they are to cover the festivities of Groundhog Day on 2 February. The celebration hinges on a rodent named Phil, which is exhorted to predict the date on which winter will give way to spring; if he sees his shadow when released from his bunker, winter will extend for six more weeks. This has its roots in Christian tradition – 2 February being the date for Candlemas – but it brings just the right touch of exotic unfamiliarity to the film, and to its title. (You can’t help feeling that audiences lost out in France and Brazil, where it was renamed A Day without End and The Black Hole of Love respectively.) Punxsutawney is for Phil a kind of expanded Room 101, no less

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra / Liberty Films, 1947)

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claustrophobic and terrifying than Winston Smith’s ordeal by rats. Being trapped in a place where everyone is worthy of scorn recalls Sartre’s observation that ‘Hell is – other people!’2 Then again, it’s difficult to imagine a location that wouldn’t prompt Phil to lash out wherever he turned, other than a hall of mirrors. Even on a first viewing the movie feels warmly familiar. It deliberately evokes two cherished works that have permeated modern storytelling: Frank Capra’s 1947 cockle-warmer It’s a Wonderful Life and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a raucous modern version of which Murray had already appeared in five years earlier (Scrooged). From Capra, the film takes the snowy small-town setting, the opportunity for one man to quantify his effect on other people, and the inbuilt ‘rewind’ and ‘re-edit’ functions that allow us to skip back and glimpse reality in a modified form. (In early drafts of Danny Rubin’s screenplay, Capra’s film was playing at Punxsutawney’s only cinema. ‘Not again!’ screams Phil. ‘I’ve seen it a jillion times.’3) From Dickens, the picture borrows the idea of a decayed soul getting the chance to pick himself up, dust himself off and start all over again, though here it’s millions of chances, millions of starts. Groundhog Day manipulates the notion of structure: though it has three discernible acts, the entire picture is disguised as a succession of beginnings. (Even the end, after the spell has been broken, is another kind of beginning.) Every story is to some extent launched with ‘once upon a time’, but Groundhog Day takes this to its maddening extreme, offering an unspecified string of once-upon-a-times, in the manner of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which reverts to a new beginning with the dawn of each chapter. The film also riffs relentlessly upon the opening of the archetypal blues lament. Now the mournful line ‘I woke up this morning …’ becomes multiplied into any number of awakenings, any number of mornings, though always in the same sad bed. Groundhog Day was released in Britain on 7 May 1993, shortly after its US opening (12 February), and met with unanimous praise. The London Evening Standard called it ‘an exceptionally sparky film’.4 Time Out declared it ‘one of the funniest, most intellectually stimulating comedies to emerge

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from the Hollywood mainstream in years’5 while the Independent on Sunday said, ‘This is a one-gag movie, but it’s a hell of a gag.’6 At the BAFTA ceremony in 1994, it won the Best Screenplay award for Ramis and Rubin. What criticisms Groundhog Day attracted were mostly aimed at its director, who is not a man renowned for overstating his own talents. (‘It’s not like I’m going to leap from Meatballs to 81⁄2,’ he once said about his prospects.7) His direction was judged to be ‘nothing special’8 and ‘too cool and restrained’.9 On the contrary, restraint is precisely what is required here. The material is so outlandish that a corresponding zaniness behind the camera could only have nudged the picture into chaos. Like Preston Sturges before him and Spike Jonze after him, Ramis keeps a steady hand at all times, treating the material with the calm deference of a nightwatchman guarding a precious stone. It was not always apparent that those closest to the film knew what they had on their hands – unless, that is, they knew only too well, and were minded to play up its more palatable elements. In the weeks before the US release, Ramis could be heard expounding his film’s virtues, coming on like Ron Howard. ‘It’s very funny, warm, romantic, spiritually uplifting and absolutely unique,’ he trumpeted.10 Well, yes. There’s not an adjective there you could quibble with, though there are plenty that you might care to add. Ramis could also have said ‘experimental’, ‘challenging’ or ‘ambivalent’. But it would have been ridiculous to do so. Those words don’t sell tickets. And Groundhog Day sold a lot: the picture grossed $70.9 million at the US box-office alone. Critics were quick to corroborate Ramis’s claims for his movie. Several phrases kept cropping up in reviews – ‘old-fashioned’, ‘feel-good’, ‘Capraesque’. Many writers did commend the film for resisting the descent into sentimentality commonly associated with these descriptions. Still, there remained little advance warning to tip off the Ordinary Joe in the street, or the Unsuspecting Marcus in the video store, about the depths of existential despair to which the film’s hero would sink before devoting himself to a life of productivity and altruism – a transformation that, as the Sunday Telegraph among others observed, is effected purely because ‘he has exhausted all the alternatives’.11

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Strangely, the only hint that Groundhog Day might in some way prove to be untrustworthy could be found in one of the rare lukewarm notices with which it was greeted. Variety griped that it was hard to know ‘when [Murray is] still being ironically [sic] or actually attempting to be sincere … a little more genuine feeling along the way wouldn’t have hurt, and when [the film] finally does give in to its Capraesque side, it’s satisfying’.12 In complaining that the conventional flow of emotion was impeded, and in berating the film for not honouring the formula that it appeared to uphold, the Variety review inadvertently acknowledged one of the film’s most bewitching qualities. As the New Statesman noted, it ‘appeals at once to absolute idealism and absolute cynicism’.13 Depending on the eye of the beholder, this particular glass can appear half-full or half-empty – brimming over with the milk of human kindness, or shattered into pieces on the floor. It’s a kind of miracle that neither interpretation ever fully negates the other. This above all else is what makes it rewarding to keep returning to Groundhog Day. It’s a gorgeous irony that this film, about a man doomed to live one day for eternity, is anything but predictable. The absence of explanation that irritated Marcus in About a Boy – ‘he liked to know how things worked,’ writes Hornby14 – has actually preserved the film’s enigma, and increased its allure. Some drafts of the script, written by Rubin and subsequently rewritten by Ramis, had experimented with various reasons for Phil Connors’s predicament. It would be hard now to express an adequate degree of gratitude that these were jettisoned. In a medium anchored by exposition, motivation, back-story and closure, Groundhog Day is a film that dares to withhold. It might take its initial cue from A Christmas Carol, but Ebenezer Scrooge gets off lightly compared to Phil Connors. While ghosts accompany Scrooge, commenting helpfully on his torment, Phil is abandoned without instruction or insight in his icy, isolated hell. The audience, similarly stranded, will know how he feels. The film functions as an open-ended compendium of speculative alternative days, where Phil’s actions impact upon the ensuing 24 hours in

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ways that are sometimes painstakingly itemised, sometimes merely alluded to, so that we can never be certain exactly how long he spends in limbo. Other film-makers have tended when daydreaming about the nature of fate to restrict themselves to a finite schedule of parallel realities. There were two in the case of Smoking/No Smoking (1993), directed by Alain Resnais from the plays by Alan Ayckbourn, tracing the implications resulting from one woman’s decision to smoke a cigarette – or not. And there were three realities bouncing off a single springboard in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), influenced by Krzysztof Kießlowski’s 1981 Blind Chance. Tykwer’s film trailed its high-speed heroine through three different versions of the same hectic twenty-minute period; Kießlowski’s more meditative template proposed a trio of contrasting outcomes in the life of one man scrambling to catch a train. The use of the rail journey as catalyst for alternative realities resurfaced in Sliding Doors (1997), where a Hollywood star (Gwyneth Paltrow) and a helping of romantic comedy banished any whiff of Polish austerity. It is not just to the parallel-reality sub-genre that Groundhog Day belongs, but also to the more illustrious species of the psychological mystery movie, where the point is the resonance of the mystery, rather than its solution. In David Lynch’s twin noir nightmares, Lost Highway (1996) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), one reality is simply substituted for another halfway through the narrative, without explanation or warning. Kießlowski himself revisited the concept of multiple realities a decade after Blind Chance in The Double Life of Veronique (1993), a film that contrives the same delicious obfuscation of logic as Groundhog Day. A lingering riddle, seductively phrased, will never hurt a film’s chances of longevity. Why are the guests unable to leave the dinner party in The Exterminating Angel (1962)? Where did Anna disappear to in L’Avventura (1959)? And what exactly happened to Phil Connors on that long, long 2 February?

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2 In the Loop Groundhog Day was the first thing that Danny Rubin wrote after arriving in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. He had been living in Chicago, writing for two theatre companies and a local television show, before he sold his first screenplay, Silencer – eventually filmed as Hear No Evil (1993) – and moved out to Los Angeles to complete rewrites on it. So I’ve got this project optioned by a big studio, and my agent said, ‘You need to write something else quickly, because everyone in town has read the other one.’ There were two parts to the Groundhog Day idea. Originally I’d thought about this guy repeating the same day over and over again. But it didn’t have a heart; I didn’t know who the character was, or what to do with it. A couple of years later, I bought one of the Anne Rice Vampire novels. I was thinking, ‘Why did I buy this? Oh, I remember reading the first one, I liked it that they were just like people, only some of the rules were different, and I liked how they were immortal.’ I started thinking about what it would be like to live for a really long time. Would you change, or are you stuck as yourself no matter what? The idea of repeating one day is just a twodimensional comedy idea. But when you think of it in terms of immortality, then all of a sudden it’s about something. After that, the ideas came together very quickly.15

Rubin was not the first writer to dramatise the ‘loop’ idea. Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay is about a man who dies at forty-three, and is reborn into his eighteen-year-old self, who lives a different life to the age of forty-three, when he dies again, and lives another life, and dies again. After Groundhog Day opened, specific concerns were voiced about issues of authorship. Twenty years before the film’s release, the sciencefiction writer Richard A. Lupoff had penned a short story, ‘12:01PM’, which focused on a time loop similar to the one that would later ensnare Phil Connors. This was adapted in 1990 into the 30-minute 12:01PM, which starred Kurtwood Smith (RoboCop [1987], Dead Poets Society [1989]) and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film. (A feature-

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length version of the short, called 12:01, emerged in 1993.) Alarmed at the similarity between 12:01PM and Groundhog Day, Lupoff and Jonathan Heap, who had adapted and directed the short, mounted legal action, but this foundered when the film’s production company declined to support them in their efforts.16 Leon Arden also failed to contest the originality of Groundhog Day, though he did at least get to air his objections in court. He had sold the rights to his novel The Devil’s Trill, about a time loop that persistently returns one man to 15 April, the deadline for US tax returns. The screenplay, subsequently retitled One Fine Day, was touted around various studios, including Columbia Pictures, who turned it down, and Disney, who didn’t. While the studio prevaricated over the project, Groundhog Day was released, and Arden responded by suing Columbia. He was not successful. Concluding the 44-page decision, Judge Denny Chin called Groundhog Day ‘a creative, entertaining work that is substantially different from [Arden’s] expression of his idea’.17 Danny Rubin estimates that he finished his initial draft in 1988 or 1989.18 It is markedly different from the movie that it would become. ‘Now Danny’s script would be considered “independent movie style”,’ says the producer, Trevor Albert. ‘At that point, it was “European”.’19 Although Harold Ramis’s film exploits fully the device of a narrative that achieves momentum without actually moving forward, Rubin’s script was braver still. For a start, it doesn’t start at the start; it opens instead some way into the time loop, so that the audience will wonder how it can be that Phil Connors answers his landlady’s enquiries before she has even articulated them, or why it is that he plants a mighty right hook on a man who has done nothing more combative than greet him in the street. All is ultimately explained in Phil’s voiceover, which, like Rubin’s original structure, would also be expunged shortly after Ramis signed on to direct. The script went through a number of different versions. First came Rubin’s original and most formally radical draft, written on spec and circulated among studios as a writing sample. ‘I gave it to my agent,’ says Rubin, ‘and I still remember the message … “Two things, Danny: One, this is the greatest screenplay I’ve ever read; two, I don’t think I can sell it.”’20

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It was the funniest thing. All these people would say to me, ‘By the way, I love Groundhog Day! Of course, we can’t make it.’ I heard that so many times. It was my first foray into Hollywood, I’d never been to any of these meetings before, so I just played along with it and said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I never asked, ‘Why not?’ or ‘What’s wrong with it?’ By this time my agent had quit, so I needed another agent. I sent it to this guy at CAA who called me and said, ‘It’s great. Of course, I can’t represent you.’ That was another one! It was because I was unproduced, and they were snobby. But he asked if he could give it to some of his clients. He got it to Trevor Albert, and he in turn showed it to Harold.21

‘It’s a double-edged sword when you find something that’s extremely interesting,’ says Albert. ‘It may be too interesting for the mainstream tastes of Hollywood. That was sort of the case with this script. Most people’s eyes would glaze over when I would even discuss it.’22 ‘That happened when I told people about it too,’ says Rubin. ‘If you don’t see how it’s played out, with the various shorthand devices, it just sounds boring.’23 But Ramis was hooked, so Columbia Pictures optioned the script and hired Rubin to do a rewrite. In the version that Rubin delivered, incorporating notes from Ramis and Columbia executives, the voiceover had been pared down considerably, and the action now began earlier in the time loop. Phil’s age had gone from twentysomething to latethirties because, recalls Rubin, ‘I was told that most of the castable comic actors would be a little bit older than that …’24 The tone had also changed. ‘I think that my first draft was a very existential script,’ says Rubin. It was just about Phil and Phil’s journey through life. And I really liked that about it; I saw it as an epic – like Siddhartha – a young man’s journey through life … I went back and thought I needed something to signal his change, and that should be a female character, and on some level it should be a love story. I think one of the necessary things to happen for this to become a studio movie was for it to become a romantic comedy … there had been one other outfit that was interested in the script – IRS Pictures –

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and they had told me, ‘It will be a $3-million movie … and we guarantee we’ll make it the way you wrote it.’ … I was making a career choice, and I decided to go with the studio.25

Although Rubin was contractually permitted to write another draft, Columbia turned to Ramis for the next rewrite (Rubin says that ‘they wanted the Harold Ramis touch’26), which removed most of the voiceover and pulled back further to just before the loop, as well as axing several superfluous characters such as Rita’s boyfriend Max Tillinghast. ‘I’d constantly told Danny Rubin that I loved the fact that he just started right in the middle with the device already running,’ says Ramis. ‘I promised him it was one thing I’d never change. And, of course, it was the first thing I changed.’27 ‘Someone in Harold’s office convinced him that it would be a delicious thing to watch Phil wake up on that first day,’ remembers Rubin.28 ‘It was our development executive, Whitney White,’ says Ramis, ‘who said, “Most of the audience will feel cheated if they don’t see his reaction to the onset of the time loop.”’29 Rubin found it difficult to forsake his beloved notion of bewitching the audience from the off. For me, the first act is just plain boring. The set up is so familiar. Here’s Phil, here’s what he’s like. Oh, here’s Larry. Here’s Rita. For me it was much more exciting to start with this guy waking up and somehow knowing everything that was going to happen. Instead, there’s the standard way of telling the story. Clearly it works. It’s a great movie. But my taste is toward movies that experiment with form as well as subject matter, whereas Hollywood likes the comforts of its form. If you can put one good idea into that form, then you’re probably doing really well. And the movie was definitely the synthesis of my first script, and Harold’s understanding of what the studio needed to feel comfortable. I felt like I was giving up a lot at the time, but he seemed to know how much you could give up without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.30

Ramis’s draft was accepted by Columbia, and Bill Murray was cast. Ramis and Murray worked on the script together but, recalls Rubin, ‘could

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not come to an agreement of how it should further develop’.31 At this time, the script was some considerable way from perfection. Ramis’s second revised draft begins with a shot of hibernating groundhogs before taking us directly into Phil’s office, where he is asleep on the sofa beneath ‘a pile of coats and a stolen airline blanket’.32 Although we would have seen snippets of Phil’s weather forecast interspersed with the groundhog footage, he is not properly introduced until his executive producer Gil Hawley rouses him. (Hawley’s initials suggest ‘ground’ and ‘hog’, while the act of waking Phil foreshadows the groundhog ritual.) HAWLEY

It’s February first, Phil. You know what tomorrow is? Phil sits up and thinks hard. He’s in his mid-thirties, smart, rugged-looking, perhaps a little too full of himself, but clearly a guy with a lot of personality. PHIL

Oh, no! Not again … Forget it! I’m not going.33

Much of the dialogue that would later end up shared between Rita and Larry is here found in Hawley’s mouth.34 The character’s other purpose is to ‘pimp out’ Rita to Phil. Realising that he is being bullied into covering Groundhog Day, Phil asks: ‘What’ll you give me?’ to which Hawley replies sinisterly, ‘I’ll give you Rita.’35 This provides a thematic link to Phil’s later line to Rita – ‘Will you be my love slave?’36 (altered in the film to: ‘Could you help me with my pelvic tilt?’37). The master/servant imagery continues in Phil’s come-on to Nancy, also eventually excised, in which he asks: ‘You want to play doggie obedience school with me?’ before demanding that she should ‘Sit! Stay!’38 These mean-spirited touches from Ramis would be corrected in the movie, which climaxes not at a wedding reception, as in the earliest versions of the script, but at a charity bachelor auction. When Rita successfully pledges over $300 to have Phil as her slave, and tells him ‘I bought you – I own you’, she is exorcising the chauvinistic demons that had haunted that embryonic draft. Similarly, Phil’s tender line to Rita when they finally wake up together on 3 February – ‘I said stay, so you

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stayed … Stay … stay’ – also rehabilitates his command to Nancy, and is now used instead to evoke his shock at being once more in sync with the world. The biggest flaw of Ramis’s draft is its emphasis on engineering explanations for the time loop. Rubin was understandably reluctant to relinquish this enigma. I had to fight for that so much. The studio argued that the audience would be confused. I told them that if we explain it, we trivialise it. Who cares if it’s a celestial event or whatever? They actually made me write an explanation scene at one point. I was very upset. Harold called me and said, ‘Just write something. Maybe I’ll shoot it, maybe I won’t. We can always cut it out.’ I thought that was dangerous territory. I said, ‘What do you want? A gypsy curse or something?’ That was the most stupid, commercial idea I could think of. He said, ‘Yeah, just write that.’ So I did, and unfortunately everyone liked it. But Harold very smartly never shot the scene.39

Rubin had already made a cutting reference, in his first revision, to the studio’s need for exposition: Phil idly wonders whether his predicament was caused by ‘the magnetic black hole of time … Or maybe it was that gypsy curse.’40 A version of that curse found its way into Ramis’s script, and proves that Rubin was not exaggerating his contempt. It makes depressing reading. In the Pittsburgh prologue, Phil dumps his possessive lover, Stephanie Decastro (note the symbolic name), who is described in the notes as ‘not quite FATAL ATTRACTION but still a little scary’.41 For revenge she turns to 101 Curses, Spells and Enchantments You Can Do at Home. By the end of the ritual, a cracked watch lies among the burning feathers and Tarot cards; its hands have halted at 5.59.42 As well as maintaining the mystery surrounding the cause of the loop, Rubin had also refrained from specifying the days that Phil spends in limbo. To preserve the vagueness, while also capturing the magnitude of the time loop, he conceived the idea of a bookcase in the bed-andbreakfast. Phil set himself the task of reading one page every day so that, by the end of the film, the bookcase would be a silent but imposing

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monument to the hundreds, even thousands, of years that had disappeared. This was another cause for consternation for the studio, and the second revision contains what looks like an instance of compromise – Phil’s admission to Mrs Lancaster, just under halfway through the script, that ‘I’ve already been here for 211 days.’43 ‘Again,’ says Rubin, I fought for the bookcase for a long time. Ultimately it became this weird political issue because if you asked the studio, ‘How long was the repetition?’, they’d say, ‘Two weeks.’ But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time. It’s not like a sitcom where the problem is solved after 221⁄2 minutes. For me it had to be – I don’t know. A hundred years. A lifetime.44

Ramis maintains that the original script had specified that Phil was stuck for 10,000 years because of the significance of that time-span in Buddhist teachings, but Rubin denies this. ‘Harold likes that allusion,’ he says, And it’s good for the legend of the film because of the Buddhist connection. However, that wasn’t on my mind. People generally assume it’s five years. Or ten. However long it took Phil to learn the piano. But Harold is a very good politician in the Hollywood system. He fudged the issue, made it less specific. So he had to remove the bookcase reference.45

As if the curse wasn’t enough, Ramis expanded upon an encounter with a white-coated scientist that was given short shrift in Rubin’s first revision. Ramis’s version will please anyone who takes their poppycock straight, no chaser: SCIENTIST

(authoritatively)

Now if the moon exerts a gravitational pull strong enough to cause the tides, then it may be theoretically possible for a Black Hole or a singularity of sufficient magnitude to actually bend time enough to cause it to fold back in on itself.

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PHIL

You think that’s a realistic possibility?46

Ramis was also fond of the parallel between Phil’s attempts to woo Rita, and the fairy tale of The Frog Prince. The first reference to it comes as Phil passes a classroom and hears a girl talking with her teacher. LITTLE GIRL

The princess kissed the frog and the spell got broke and he turned into a handsome prince and they got married and lived happily ever after. TEACHER

That’s right.47

The tale is forgotten until Phil is puckering up for his climactic kiss with Rita on what will be the last of his Groundhog Days: PHIL

This one’s for the Frog Prince. RITA

What? PHIL 48

Nothing.

The analogy serves little purpose other than to crank up the sentimentality quota. Again, Rubin was unimpressed. I was delighted to see that a couple of things Harold had insisted on were not in the finished film. The Frog Prince idea was not to my taste. It made me barf so much! He wrote it, they shot it. I’m sure it was very cute.49

By the time Ramis had reached the end of his second revision, only one chunk of Phil’s voiceover had survived the ‘delete’ button. It comes as Phil savours the delicious freedom of 3 February, and clearly belongs in a film of an inferior stripe:

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PHIL

(v.o.)

And so began my final lifetime, and ended the longest winter on record. I would find myself no longer able to affect the chain of events in this town, but I did learn something about time. You can waste time, you can kill time, you can do time, but if you use it wisely, there’s never enough of it. So you’d better make the most of the time you’ve got … Larry never got through the blizzard, so none of my groundhog reports ever made it on air. But Rita and I – we lived happily ever after.50

Most other differences between this draft and the movie itself come down to extensions or exaggerations of surviving scenes. Phil is depicted as a careless and carnivorous lover, rather than the buffoon that he is in the film. ‘I thought maybe you could meet me [in Punxsutawney] tonight and let me vulgarize you for about seven hours,’ he says in a call to an unidentified squeeze.51 Some distance into the loop, he spends an evening with two women described in the script in flatly misogynistic terms: ‘A slut named ANGIE and another overweight, not very pretty MADONNA WANNABE, both in too-tight jeans and bullet bras …’52 The ‘next’ morning, he boasts to Rita that he ‘partied all night long with some nymphomaniac biker chicks’.53 There was also a sequence in which a heavily tattooed Phil, looking like ‘Sid Viscious [sic] on crack’, presides over a drunken orgy; Ramis specifies that the scene should resemble ‘outtakes from Fellini’s Satyricon’.54 The only trace of that in the film comes when Phil arrives at the Alpine Theater in a Fistful of Dollars costume, accompanied by a woman dressed as a French maid. Ramis’s flights of fancy may have been too vulgar to serve such a formally tidy work, but at least he knows when to shave a scene to the bone. Not only did he cut back the debauchery to a minimum, increasing its absurdity, but he also dropped an excessive sequence in which Phil wrecks his bedroom at the beginning of his third Groundhog Day, just to see if it will return to its normal state when he wakes the ‘next’ day. Out went the gallons of red paint splashed over the walls, and the shot of Phil shaving a bald stripe down the centre of his scalp, to be

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replaced by the far lovelier image of the pencil that Phil snaps before retiring, only to find it restored to its original state in the morning. It was also judicious of Ramis to junk scenes, carried over from Rubin’s first revision, in which Phil stalks the groundhog with a gun. The image would have brought unhelpful echoes of Caddyshack, in which the same actor waged war on a gopher. Another gag, which also appeared in Rubin’s first revision, might have been better suited to the coarseness of that earlier film: EXT. STREET

– DAY

A woman passes walking her dog. PHIL

Hey, pick up after your dog! DOG WALKER

He hasn’t done anything. PHIL

He’s going to! (pointing) There and there. And there!55

Many of Phil’s lines would be improved by Murray, who sharpens the script’s vague asides into poisonous zingers. The script has Phil explaining his encounter with the hideous Ned Ryerson by saying, ‘I got hung up with some jerk I went to high school with.’56 Once it has filtered through Murray’s scabrous sensibility, the line emerges as: ‘It was horrible. A giant leech got me.’ Other improvements are too numerous to list. Let us all simply be thankful that Bill Murray exists. Without him, comic improvisation would be a mediocre discipline in which pretty good might be good enough. After reading the second revision, Columbia hired Rubin again, and sent him Ramis’s draft. ‘I read it and gave them many pages of notes that were honest but kind of ballsy and sarcastic,’ says Rubin. ‘And apparently because of the tone of my notes they decided to pay attention to them, and Bill said, “Why don’t we hire this guy back again” and they called me up and said, “Why don’t you come back and work with Bill and fix up the script for production?”’57 Writer and actor visited the 1992 Groundhog

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Day festivities in Punxsutawney, and then proceeded to New York to pick over the script. ‘It was still in a mess three weeks prior to shooting,’ says Rubin. It was really a case of Bill and me going through it and saying, ‘Are we keeping this? Are we keeping that?’ The difficulty was that his work ethic was not about making a lot of tracks, or putting down a lot of hours. It was a bit frustrating, but then we met up with Harold in Illinois, where they were prepping the set, and that’s when it came together.58

Ramis and Rubin talked through the remaining issues still unresolved in the script, then divided up the writing to be done before conferencing together their separate drafts into the shooting script. It was at this meeting that Rubin encouraged his co-writer to prune some of the script’s more ribald touches. Harold’s draft had a lot of adolescent, topical humour. I said, ‘You’ve gotta take all this out, because this movie is really going to go on for years and years.’ If he had put in this timely stuff, references to 1990s things, then that kind of humour would quickly have dated. My original script was very whimsical and playful, more like Kind Hearts and Coronets. I was hoping they weren’t going to cheapen it.59

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3 1 February The first few seconds of the picture seem to bear out Danny Rubin’s concern that his extraordinary premise was having the magic squeezed out of it. Certainly there is good news and bad news about the start of Groundhog Day. Bad news first. It begins with a shot of accelerated cloud formations, an image that is only slightly less clichéd than the peeling leaves of a calendar, or the swiftly rotating hands of a clock, in its evocation of the passing of time.60 The main credits bring more bad news in the form of a cheesy pop number called ‘Weatherman’, penned by Harold Ramis with the film’s composer George Fenton. Ramis has a soft spot for MOR rock and pop – the kind of music that brings out the ‘white man’s overbite’, as Billy Crystal remarked in When Harry Met Sally (1989). Traditionally, Ramis has enlisted some rock dinosaur or other to administer the aural analgesic in his movies – Kenny Loggins for Caddyshack, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham for National Lampoon’s Vacation. Here it is Delbert McClinton putting his heart and soul into lines like ‘Can’t you feel me warming up?/ Yeah, I’m your weatherman.’ Music for people in stiff Wranglers and weekend sneakers. Now the good news. Even these bad judgments are underpinned by sound reasoning. The idea is to preserve an unassuming air: don’t tip off the audience about the surrealism to come. To all appearances, this is just another forgettable theme song ushering in any old American comedy fit for a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon. Rubin is correct to argue that the completed film is less experimental than his script. What he may not appreciate, having witnessed the incremental compromise of some of his ideas, is that the pleasure in a movie can come as much from context as content. Groundhog Day is a mainstream Hollywood comedy, no question. But its effectiveness and daring can only be enhanced by our awareness of that parentage. It is unsurprising to find pioneering directors like Buñuel, Kießlowski, Resnais or Lynch distorting form and muddying content. In this Hollywood setting, though, such an experiment begins to look incongruous, even suicidal.

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The shot of speeding clouds gives way to a scene in the local television studio (WPBH Action News, Channel 9, Pittsburgh) where Phil Connors is in the middle of his weather forecast. The jaunty polka fades out, and the sound of Phil’s voice fades in, suggesting that we have joined him some way into the broadcast – a small ellipsis that foreshadows the larger ones to come. The first thing we see is a completely blue screen. Phil’s opening line gives a hint of what lies in store for him. ‘Somebody asked me today: “Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?” And I said to them, “Probably right here.”’ On ‘here’, his hand moves into view. He is gesturing at the middle of the vast blue void. The place where he would most like to be is in that void: the middle of nowhere, off the map. Be careful what you wish for, Phil. The camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing against a blue screen over which the satellite weather map is super-imposed. He is, literally, in limbo. His actions only make sense in context – on the television screen to the right of the frame, his abstract hand movements relate to the weather map, but in the real world there is no harmony between him and his mise en scène. In the real world, he looks like he’s flailing. Even before Phil gets his first hostile line, it is clear that he is going to be a symbol of cynicism and complacency. For starters, he works in

Phil in a void

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television, which is cinematic shorthand for moral bankruptcy. In Scrooged, Murray had played another sleazebag whose abhorrent qualities had provided qualification enough for a job in TV. Television also became the adoptive habitat of Murray’s self-interested Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters II (1989), in which the fallen hero presided over a phoney-headed series about the paranormal. You get the message. Phil is a sleazeball. And if you didn’t get the message, then the casting would give the game away. When Rubin wrote the screenplay, he didn’t regard it primarily as a comedy: I wanted it to feel whimsical, but real. I think in the end it felt a little less real than I expected … I wanted a Kevin Kline – someone like that. The studio wanted a big comedian in the centre role. I was sceptical. I like Bill Murray’s work, but I didn’t think he had the acting chops to make it work. Harold told me that [Bill] would be right for the part, and he was right. At that time Bill was starting to take on more meaty roles as an actor, and it came at a good time for him.61

Murray’s ambition to be a serious actor had manifested itself in his cherished 1984 film of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, which he also co-directed. He had moved into film in the late 1970s from the hit TV show Saturday Night Live, as well as the touring revues of SCTV and National Lampoon. In the latter, he had performed, at the encouragement of John Belushi, alongside his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray (who appears as Buster, Punxsutawney’s Mayor, in Groundhog Day) and Ramis, among others. The Razor’s Edge was widely mocked, and it would be some time before Murray attempted another ‘straight’ role – that came in Mad Dog and Glory (1993), released shortly after Groundhog Day, in which he played a bullying mob boss who loans out his moll to a cop. The years beginning with Groundhog Day have been Murray’s most fruitful period – he delivered one of the performances of his life as a broken-hearted billionaire in Rushmore (1998), essayed a delightful Polonius in Michael Almereyda’s grunged-up Hamlet (1999), and turned on the crumpled

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charm as an actor abroad in Lost in Translation (2003) for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. But even in his least accomplished films you could discern a rumble of something dangerous beneath that crust of indifference. This man looked like he might really do some damage if he could ever be bothered to get out of his pyjamas, clear away the three-day-old pizza boxes, brush his hair, find his keys … It wasn’t until the early 1990s, with inspired turns in decent movies (Quick Change [1990], What about Bob? [1991]), that Bill Murray fans stopped having to apologise for the films in which their idol appeared. With Stripes (1981), you would find yourself saying, ‘Yes, it’s got a topless mud-wrestling contest, but Murray’s fantastic …’ With Ghostbusters it was, ‘Yes, it’s dreary to look at, but when Murray tries his hand at romance …’ On Groundhog Day the excuses went out of the window forever, along with the rulebook. Murray’s sour charisma depends upon not suffering fools gladly – ‘Morons, your bus is leaving,’ he snarls at a brace of Punxsutawney goofballs – while never quite extricating himself from the clutches of foolishness. He can bring equal zest to arrogance and naivety, but he is at his most triumphant when the two blur into one line, one facial twitch, one shrug. Trying to discourage his girlfriend from leaving in Stripes, he says blithely: ‘You can’t go. All the plants are gonna die.’ Stand back: that’s Bill Murray pulling out all the stops. Melancholic Murray in Rushmore (Wes Anderson / Touchstone Pictures, American Empirical / Touchstone Home Video, 1998)

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There can be few actors who ever cared less – or rather, who displayed less compunction about revealing how little they cared. You can well believe that this baggy, pockmarked face, forever dewy with a film of early-morning sweat, really looks like that in his bathroom mirror at home. You can take it on trust that his grouchiness has not been exaggerated for the camera, just as you can assume that W. C. Fields really did get soused at the Black Pussy Cat Café once production on The Bank Dick (1940) was through. As with Fields, we enter into a conspiratorial relationship with Murray: he’s on ‘our’ side, the side of subdued lunacy and transgression, against ‘them’, the squares, the stiffs, the stupidos. But he retains an unpalatable savagery. It emerges in flashes – when he compliments a woman in Kingpin (1996), only to undermine his apparent chivalry by spitting the words ‘Not you’ at her dining companion. Our wariness of him comes from the realisation that he could turn on ‘us’ as easily as he turns on ‘them’. ‘There is a nasty side to Bill that he wasn’t afraid to reveal in the film,’ says Ramis.62 When he was up, his arrival on set would be heralded by loud ‘feel good’ music to match his mood. At other times, it’s like working with Vincent Van Gogh – on a bad day. He seems so tortured by the demands on his creative resources, so plagued by public attention, you might think he was on the verge of cutting off his ear (or one of yours). I really think it has to do with his acting style. He hates the Strasberg Method and won’t really prepare in the classical manner, so he is forced to rely pretty much on inspiration, wit, instinct and impulse. When it works for him, it’s truly magical. But there are times when he really has to dig for it, to mine his deepest energy reserves to come up with something good. It’s difficult and it’s draining …63

You read those words with which Ramis describes his friend – ‘so tortured … so plagued by public attention’ – and you instantly see Phil Connors. It wouldn’t be spurious to suggest that, while we are many of us stuck in our own Groundhog Days, actors might recognise it more keenly

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than most – hitting the same marks, endlessly delivering the same lines (‘We shot 25 takes on the romantic climax of the film,’ says Ramis64), answering the same ill-researched questions from hacks in Cannes, Copenhagen, Minsk. No wonder so many reviewers picked up on the similarity between the various rehearsals of reality that Phil gets before committing for all eternity one flawless version, and the multiple takes open to an actor chasing perfection. As Phil, Murray’s dial spins from charm to contempt with alarming speed. He larks around in his broadcast, but the moment he is off air, the smile drops with a clang. ‘You guys are gonna have fun,’ observes a colleague as they watch Rita fooling around in front of the blue screen. ‘She’s fun,’ sneers Phil. ‘But not my kind of fun.’ We can only imagine what Phil’s kind of fun would entail. Something unsavoury, no doubt – Murray has the face of a man who has seen it all, loathed it all, and is searching in vain for an experience to shock him out of his boredom. That’s what makes him perfect for this film. His best performances – here and in Stripes and Rushmore – have always been as men forced against their nature to simply do something. In Groundhog Day, it is not only that the film would founder without his active energy: the character would founder too. You sensed that John Winger in Stripes and Herman Blume in Rushmore could have gone on forever doing nothing, simply rolling obediently into their graves when the time came to die. Groundhog Day can be read as a deeper commentary on Murray’s persona. John was motivated by army life; Herman got kicked into gear by his friendship with a precocious student. But Phil is nudged into action only by becoming bored with boredom – bored, in other words, with being Bill Murray. Even before the first 2 February has dawned, there are other minor repetitions and reflections to suggest Phil’s imprisonment has begun. ‘You must really enjoy it,’ says his co-presenter, when Phil announces that he’s off to Punxsutawney. ‘This is your third year in a row.’ Phil shoots her a look that could fell an ox. ‘Four,’ he corrects her. Punitive images litter the studio. There is the frame-within-the-frame of the TV monitor, which cages him, as well as the backdrop beyond the anchorperson’s desk, which places the Pittsburgh skyline behind bars. Phil’s off-the-cuff dialogue invites fate to

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take a jab at him. He advises viewers to ‘leave your galoshes at home’. Perhaps he will remember that suggestion when he steps, time and again, into the giant, rain-filled pothole on Punxsutawney’s main street. In contrast to Phil, Rita is presented as playful and child-like. Not infantilised – her professional status precludes that – but certainly in touch with a fuller complement of pleasures than the ones to which Phil has access. Although, like Phil, she is first seen against the blue screen, it’s important that the studio and technical equipment are visible in the same shot – she is not divorced from her environment or her co-workers as Phil is in his introductory shot. We hear Rita giggle before we hear her speak. She is described as a ‘really nice’ person whose interest lies in capturing ‘the people and the fun, the excitement’ of Groundhog Day. In those terms it sounds like a sketchy piece of characterisation. And the role’s opportunities for growth aren’t increased by the narrative, which requires everyone to remain immobile while Phil Connors undergoes a dramatic personality change in their midst. The Independent argued, ‘since for Rita each 2 February is her first, the character can’t develop, and she remains in essence a lovely hologram’.65 But while it’s true that there is only one learning curve in the film, it is also the case that some of the characters are allowed to deepen – to move inwards if not upwards or onwards. For Andie MacDowell, there is the chance to reveal aspects of Rita that might not have been glimpsed under other circumstances. Unlike her co-star, MacDowell didn’t have a sizeable persona to work with when the film was made. Still to come were Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and her finest performance, coincidentally supporting another man with cathode rays in his soul, in Altman’s Short Cuts (1993). By the time she made Groundhog Day, she had not been much more than demure. Here we see her affectionate, angry, distressed and, occasionally, violent. Rita seems like a wholesome and uncomplicated woman, but the film’s rigid grind exposes cracks in her veneer. It feels vaguely narcissistic, for instance, that she would begin to display affection toward Phil simply because he engineers parallels between their respective habits and interests. Rita warms to him when he orders sweet vermouth on the rocks, as she does, and toasts world peace, as she claims to do. She

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softens visibly when he mentions Baudelaire, and trills upon learning that Phil keeps her favourite ice-cream freezing on the outer window ledge. But it should perhaps have taken more than these elements to propel her into the arms of a man whom she had regarded only hours earlier as an oaf. A person who is relieved of their common sense based on a few random coincidences and a tub of Rocky Road may not be so wholesome after all. Which, in turn, can only be for the good of Rita, and the film. Decades of screwball comedies have primed us for the playfulness between Phil and Rita, and when they spark in their first scene together, in the van en route to Punxsutawney, you warm to the film. Inside the van, Phil and Rita are always framed in a two-shot, hinting at their later romance, while Larry, who will still be loveless in the final scenes, is on his own at the wheel. Phil tempts fate again: ‘Some day somebody’s gonna see me interviewing a groundhog and think I don’t have a future.’ Of course, he doesn’t have a future. Maybe that’s what is tickling the giant laughing groundhog on the billboard that welcomes visitors to Punxsutawney (‘The original weather capitol of the world since 1887 … pop: 6,782’). The van is dwarfed by it. Phil doesn’t stand a chance. Our first glimpse of the town contains a joke that the camera simply pans past. That’s typical of Ramis’s restraint – and who knew the word could ever be applied to the man responsible for the turd-in-the-pool

In the shadow of the groundhog

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scene in Caddyshack? As the van drives into Punxsutawney, the Alpine Theater is screening Heidi II, hailed outside as ‘a family classic’. It’s a silly gag, but it has fangs. Cinemas routinely programme repetitive or derivative movies, but Groundhog Day is one of the few films that takes repetition as its subject. In the month that it opened in the US, audiences were presented with no shortage of alternative examples of cinematic déjà vu. Also released in the same four-week period were Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, Weekend at Bernie’s II, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, an American remake of The Vanishing and a comically redubbed version of a 1964 Italian adventure repackaged as Hercules Returns. At the time of writing (summer 2003), the world’s multiplexes have yet to emerge from an even greater originality lag that has spanned the summer: talk about a cinematic Groundhog Day. Supplies of the number ‘2’ have been left severely depleted at my local Odeon, where a backwards ‘S’ is now routinely brought into service for the marquee whenever two or more sequels are showing at the same time. (It’s just as well they don’t bother with colons.) What a blitz: X-Men 2, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Jungle Book 2, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Jeepers Creepers 2, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, American Pie: The Wedding, Freddy V Jason, as well as remakes of The Four Feathers and The Italian Job, all within the space of a season. (If the Italian–Spanish remake of Groundhog Day, imaginatively titled È già ieri – or It’s Already Yesterday – had materialised in time for summer, that would have been the ultimate punchline.66) Rubin himself jokes about writing a sequel to Groundhog Day. ‘We’d give it a name like Groundhog Day II: Return to Punxsutawney. The rest of the movie would be identical – we’d just re-release it.’67 But that doesn’t seem so funny, or so far-fetched, from where I’m sitting. Past the cinema, the van heads into the town square. The square is such a pivotal location for small-town comedies from the same gene pool – from It’s a Wonderful Life to Back to the Future (1985) – that the chance to film in Punxsutawney itself was passed up in favour of Woodstock, Illinois,

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solely because the town square in the latter location was more centrally situated. Disgorging outside a hotel, Phil remarks, ‘I’m not staying here’, to which Rita replies, with subtly different emphasis, ‘You’re not staying here.’ Another repetition. She’s booked him into a bed-and-breakfast around the corner. He is toxic even in his gratitude. He commends Rita for choosing to ‘keep the talent happy’ and makes a lewd wisecrack. Rita and Larry laugh wearily among themselves as Phil drives off in the van. The sound dips subtly, and the image dissolves into a shot of the dawn sky. It’s 2 February. Seven minutes and nine seconds of the film have passed, and now we’re stuck fast.

An ordinary 2 February in paradise

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4 Groundhog Days 2 February, Day 1: ‘I make the weather!’ A cockerel crows in the distance. Cut to an exterior shot of the bed-andbreakfast where Phil is staying. It looks like it’s made of sugar; it belongs on top of a cake that might be presented at a retirement party. There’s a white archway at the bottom of the path, and a white picket fence running around the garden. Sculptures – an angel here, a reindeer there – are dotted on the grass, which is patched with snow. Cut to a radio alarm clock on a bedside table. It could be any radio alarm clock, any table. Any room – flowery wallpaper, a nondescript bed, a vase of plastic flowers. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. The alarm kicks in. Sonny and Cher are nearing the end of their bubblegum love song ‘I Got You Babe’. We hear Sonny singing ‘Then put your little hand in mine / There ain’t no hill or mountain we can’t climb.’ The song had miraculously survived every draft of the script. Rubin says: I remembered it as a song that involved a lot of repetition of that phrase, ‘I got you babe’, as well as a false ending, after which the repetitions start up again. I don’t think we wound up even using that aspect of the song in the movie. But that’s how I came up with the song, and it continued to be a good idea as the script progressed. Plus, of course, it’s a love song with some ironic resonances with the love story of the movie.68

The camera pulls back slowly to the left. ‘I got you, babe …’ And ‘got’ has other meanings too – understood, snared, bamboozled. He’s got you, babe. He’s got you. The words sound sinister when they’re repeated, but then that’s pop songs for you. Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you. Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide, I’m gonna find you … Phil opens his eyes as the inane DJ patter floods the song. ‘OK campers, rise and shine’ booms the voice, ‘and don’t forget your booties ’cos it’s cold out there!’ As Phil scurries to the bathroom and splashes his face, the ping-ponging conversation between the two DJs already feels like Chinese

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water torture. These buffoons insist on repeating what one another says – ‘The big question on everybody’s lips…’ says one, before his partner interrupts with ‘Their chapped lips,’ and so on. The idiocy reaches its peak when both voices trumpet the words ‘Groundhog Day!’ in unison. Cleverly, Ramis cuts at this point to Phil’s view of the street outside, where the pedestrians are flowing toward the town square. There is no music, no overt indication that anything is awry. But the combination of the DJs shrieking ‘Groundhog Day!’ in a manner better suited to ‘Man overboard!’ just as we get our first glimpse of this ordinary day sends the mildest of chills up the spine. A fellow guest greets Phil on the landing with a banal enquiry about the groundhog. Downstairs, classical music ebbs along behind the ripples of conversation. The landlady, Mrs Lancaster, asks if Phil slept well. ‘I slept alone,’ he replies. He mocks her in a stage whisper when it transpires that she is unfamiliar with the words ‘espresso’ and ‘cappuccino’. A mirror is mounted behind the bureau, framing Phil’s reflection – trapping him. The wallpaper has pink stripes. Candy-coloured prison bars. We don’t know, as we watch for the first time these innocent introductory scenes, that we will be forced to experience them again and again. No extras on any set can ever have received so much work: you sign up to play ‘Man Drinking Coffee’ or ‘Woman in Ear-Muffs’ and then it transpires that you’re in the background of a good half a dozen scenes. Or perhaps your performance, which in any other film would pass unnoticed by all but the most eagle-eyed members of your family, is promoted when your role spills over into Phil’s catalogue of days. The woman traipsing toward the town square just after dawn on 2 February will be seen again as Phil’s piano teacher. The homeless man begging for dimes on the street corner is taunted mercilessly by Phil, who cannot simply ignore him – he must instead pretend to be reaching for his money. That man will figure strongly in Phil’s life, becoming instrumental in the enlightenment he receives. Next the film introduces the reptilian insurance salesman Ned Ryerson. A good cameo role is disproportionately effective, and Ned is one of the best. Stephen Tobolowsky gets less screen time than Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949), or Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986), but

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he is as gently menacing as either. ‘For my first audition,’ says Tobolowsky, ‘I went in and said: “I worked on this yesterday at home and I think it’s getting kind of big. It’s getting a little broad. You know, you may need a spatula to scrape me off the walls. But I’m going to go for it, OK?”’69 ‘Stephen was overwhelmingly obnoxious,’ says Ramis. ‘He made us laugh so hard during his audition reading that we hired him on the spot.’70 Much of it is in the delivery. If you heard that wheedling voice ring out, you would hold on to your wallet and run. The script describes him as a ‘big, pie-faced man’ who ‘comes huffing and puffing right up to [Phil]. There is something about this guy that makes us dislike him on sight.’71 Here he comes, clutching a creepy-looking briefcase. Goodness knows what’s inside; it suggests a euthanasia enthusiast making house calls. Ned runs inelegantly, legs shooting off in all directions, leather-gloved hands flapping like terrapin flippers. When he departs, he gives Phil a campy wave, utilising only his fingers, but there’s no fondness there: later in the time loop, when Phil feigns love for Ned in order to scare him off, it does the trick. Ned isn’t gay. You’re not sure who or what he’s into. You would be frightened to ask. Dignity has for this man ceased to be a consideration. Whereas Phil is all bad-tempered aloofness, restricting his movements, like his contact with other people, to the barest minimum, Ned is his antithesis: shrill and galumphing. He play-punches Phil just a little too hard, like anyone who uses mock violence as a form of affection or solidarity, and clings, hopelessly, to his highschool nicknames – Needlenose Ned, Ned the Head. He has even granted himself an unconvincing new title, Ned the Bull, to commemorate his singlemindedness as a salesman. It doesn’t stick. Phil just calls him ‘Needlehead’. In Ned’s few lines of dialogue, he evokes an entire, tragic life. Then there is his choice of words – less a vocabulary than the sound of nails clawing a blackboard, distilled into speech form. ‘Bing!’ he will say when a question is answered to his satisfaction. ‘Anyhoo’ does the job of ‘anyhow’. There are others: ‘Sure as heckfire’; ‘Doozy’; or the repeated question ‘Am I right, or am I right?’ blurring bizarrely into canine yapping. Ned is no more than another device for marking time – the film has little use for captions such as ‘Next day’, or ‘Three weeks later’, since the span of the picture covers only three days (the end of 1 February, the

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entirety of 2 February, and the morning of 3 February). He also brings with him an unspoken joke, since he cannot realise that flogging life insurance to Phil Connors is like selling a five-speed hedge-trimmer to an Eskimo. But without Ned’s presence, the townsfolk of Punxsutawney would be no more than cheerfully uncomplicated – or, as Phil dismisses them, ‘hicks’. Ned represents something unbearable in the community. He corroborates Phil’s contempt for Punxsutawney, which is important, since we need to feel that this would be a terrible place to be stranded. Ned brings that prospect sharply into focus; he’s hell in a camelhair coat. Leaving him, Phil plunges straight into the pothole, and Ned responds with a mocking laugh and an obscenely accusatory finger. Cut to

Phil plunges in, mocked by the dreadful Ned

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the town square, where Phil threads through the celebrating crowds toward Rita and Larry. People are dancing in the gazebo as the ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ rings out. The camera rises slightly to observe Phil’s progress, but this isn’t what you could call an ‘eye of God’ shot. In fact, the absence of any shots of that nature is evidence of Ramis’s subtlety. How tempting it might have been for another director to take refuge from the script’s ambiguities in the symbolic omniscience of the crane shot, which suggests a higher power, literally and figuratively, without needing to resort to the word ‘God’. Modern movies employ that shot so often that you’d think there was helium in the camera. Phil delivers his segment as the ceremony gets under way behind him. Ramis switches here to Larry’s point of view, with the red ‘record’ light in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, while Phil himself is once again symbolically imprisoned – this time within the borders of the frame-within-the-frame. Buster reads the decree: ‘The seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators …’. Perhaps you are paying attention to what he’s saying, perhaps not. But soon you will have his lines down pat. The groundhog is yanked from its bunker. ‘Sorry folks,’ Buster announces eventually. ‘Six more weeks of winter.’ The crowd jeers. Back to Phil, who ensures that it is his middle finger left upright at the end of his 3-2-1 countdown to camera. ‘This is one time when television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.’ Rita requests another take ‘without the sarcasm’ but Phil is already hotfooting it out of there. The van leaves Punxsutawney. George Fenton’s music has darkened now, indicating trouble ahead. ‘Perhaps it’s that giant blizzard we’re not supposed to get,’ sneers Larry as the view becomes obscured by snow. Now they come to a standstill behind solid traffic. The score imitates the dizzy swirl of snow. Phil gets out in his shirtsleeves and accosts a burly cop. ‘You can go back to Punxsutawney,’ the cop advises, ‘or you can go ahead and freeze to death.’ Phil ponders this choice. ‘I’m thinking,’ he says. This scene seems the likeliest catalyst for Phil’s imprisonment in Punxsutawney, if there can be said to be a catalyst in a movie stripped of basic cause and effect. In the prologue in the TV studio, Phil had greeted

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with exasperation the suggestion that he might prolong his trip: ‘Oh come on. I wanna stay an extra second in Punxsutawney? Please!’ An aversion to small-town life, though, hardly seems adequate reason to consign a man to a time loop for eternity. A more likely reason for Phil’s punishment is his complacency. ‘Chance of departure today: 100%,’ he assures his landlady as he leaves the bed-and-breakfast on the morning of that first Groundhog Day. Confronted by the cop, who asks him if he listens to the weather, Phil protests vainly: ‘I make the weather!’ He will come to regret this faith in his own omnipotence. Like the father and son in the first episode of Kießlowski’s Decalogue (1988), who pay dearly for using a computer to calculate the

The groundhog ceremony

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thickness of the ice on a frozen lake, Phil will suffer for his arrogance. When the endless Groundhog Days kick in, he will find himself with both more and less power than he has ever previously enjoyed. Decalogue 1, part of Kießlowski’s series interpreting the Ten Commandments, is subtitled ‘I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other God but me.’ And while God is scarcely mentioned in Groundhog Day – with the exception of Phil announcing that he is ‘A god … Not the God’ – the same grave warning would fit Ramis’s film equally well. Following the confrontation with the cop, Ramis cuts straight to a petrol station on the road to Punxsutawney, where Phil is trying to arrange a long-distance line back to Pittsburgh. From there, we find ourselves in Punxsutawney again, at the bar of the Pennsylvanian Hotel, where Phil rejects Rita’s offer to join her and Larry for dinner – the second one she has made in two days. Back at the bed-and-breakfast later that night, he takes a shower, only to find that there’s no hot water. As he trudges off to bed, he passes Mrs Lancaster. She wishes him ‘sweet dreams’. 2 February, Day 2: ‘Didn’t we do this yesterday?’ Cut to a radio alarm clock on a bedside table. It could be any radio alarm clock, any table. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. The alarm kicks in. Sonny and Cher are nearing the end of their bubblegum love song ‘I Got You Babe’. Phil opens his eyes just before the inane DJ patter floods over ‘I make the weather!’

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the song. ‘OK campers, rise and shine …’ As Phil plods to the bathroom, he shoots a few quizzical looks at the radio. ‘Nice going boys,’ he scoffs. ‘You’re playing yesterday’s tape.’ As he splashes his face, he gives another quizzical look, though he joins in on ‘chapped lips’. But when both voices trumpet the words ‘Groundhog Day!’ in unison, you can see that Phil is spooked. The pleasure here is immediate. It’s thrilling to watch the sudden collapse into confusion of a face normally rigid with superiority. Phil goes to the window, just as he did on the ‘previous’ day, and Ramis cuts to his view of the street outside, where the pedestrians are flowing toward the town square. Where there was formerly no music, there is now a low, sustained note sliding into delirium: it’s the sound of vertigo. ‘What the hell?’ says Phil. An appropriate choice of words, a mere article away from What hell? A fellow guest greets him on the landing with a banal enquiry about the groundhog. Phil eyes him suspiciously. ‘Didn’t we do this yesterday?’ he says. When the man persists, Phil shoves him against the wall. ‘Don’t mess with me, Pork-chop. What day is this?’ Pork-chop gives him the answer he was expecting, and fearing. It’s Groundhog Day. Downstairs, classical music ebbs along behind the ripples of conversation. Phil walks in, as before, but now he’s eyeing everyone warily – that waitress, that man absorbed in the newspaper, the elderly fellow in the spotted knitwear. Mrs Lancaster asks if Phil slept well. ‘Did I sleep well?’ he repeats. Innuendo and sarcasm don’t spring so readily to his lips today. The wallpaper has pink stripes. Candy-coloured prison bars. He pours himself a coffee. He has been distracted from his tendency to mock, so the script does it on his behalf. ‘Do you ever have déjà-vu, Mrs Lancaster?’ he asks the landlady. ‘I don’t think so,’ she smiles, ‘but I could check with the kitchen.’72 It’s a snide, condescending line, but the film needs it. Without occasional deviations into ambivalence, the picture would run the risk of being overly enamoured of its blithe supporting characters. Oh – and it’s a nice gag, too. Let’s not forget that. Let’s not forget, in the heat of analysis, that this is a comedy we’re watching. Phil is asked, as before, if he is checking out today, but the odds are dwindling fast. ‘I’d say the chance of departure is 80%,’ he says, then

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equivocates: ‘75–80.’ Outside, he stops a passer-by – his future piano teacher – to ask where everyone’s going. Cut to the main street. The homeless man is begging for dimes on the street corner. Remarkably, Phil retains enough wherewithal, enough spitefulness, to repeat his taunt of the ‘previous’ day, patting himself in search of a wallet that he has no intention of producing. Then we hear that voice: that ingratiating voice. As Ned greets him, Phil looks around repeatedly, as though searching for the hidden camera. He says Ned’s name – ‘Ned Ryerson?’ – with the trepidation of someone participating in an experiment for which he has not volunteered, the nervousness of a man who has found himself on stage but cannot be sure of his next line.

Something’s wrong

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Leaving him, Phil plunges straight into the pothole, Ned responding with a mocking laugh and an obscenely accusatory finger. Phil threads through the celebrating crowds toward Rita and Larry – fearfully now, scrutinising the too-familiar surroundings. People are dancing in the gazebo. Yes, that’s the ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ you can hear. Rita is only too willing to oblige when Phil says that he needs someone to give him a slap. She hits him without even pausing to ask why – a foretaste of the endless strikes that she will soon be raining down upon his leathery face. He agrees to go ahead with the broadcast, and Ramis switches as before to Larry’s point of view. ‘Well, it’s Groundhog Day.’ Beat. ‘Again.’ He’s trying to project control, but his efforts only expose its absence. Larry keeps the camera on him too long this time, and Phil’s face disintegrates into forlorn vulnerability as he runs out of the words necessary to maintain this façade of merriment. Buster reads the decree: ‘The seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators …’ To Rita and Larry’s amazement, Phil discards the microphone and wanders off. The next cut testifies to Ramis’s confidence in his audience’s sophistication, as well as to Rubin’s use of shorthand to bring to a stationary narrative the illusion of velocity. From Rita and Larry, we move straight to the shot of Phil taking a shower back at his bed-andbreakfast, and being shocked out of the tub once again by the cold water. Cut to Phil sitting on his bed, again trying and failing to arrange a long-distance call. It is now 4.04 a.m. – the early hours of 3 February. ‘Well, what if there is no tomorrow?’ he says to the person on the other end. ‘There wasn’t one today.’ That plaintive cry transports us back to Phil’s distant cousins, Hamm and Clov, stranded in their own purgatory in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: HAMM: CLOV:

Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!

(violently) That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this

bloody awful day.73

Phil goes to remove the pencil from behind his ear, and return it to its place, but thinks better of this. Instead he snaps it in half, and puts the pieces

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on the bedside table. The eerily reverberating score assures us that we have now ventured too far into the realm of the supernatural to turn back. Phil lies in bed, staring at the clock, daring it to return him to 2 February. 2 February, Day 3: ‘I’m not gonna live by their rules any more’ Extreme close-up of the radio alarm clock. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. The alarm kicks in. Sonny and Cher are nearing the end of their bubblegum love song ‘I Got You Babe’. Cut to Phil waking up with a jolt, gasping for breath. His skin is waxy and cadaverous. He reaches toward the bedside table, but the pencil is gone. Not only is it beneath the table, but it is has been restored to its original condition. Now that Ramis and Rubin have got us in their clutches, they no longer need to run through exactly the same rituals. Now they can abbreviate the hours, play mix-andmatch with the touchstones of Phil’s day. Repetition is the means by which we absorb our earliest lessons – nursery rhymes and lullabies, the colours of the rainbow, when to say please and thank you. In the comforting darkness of the cinema auditorium we can experience a partial return to infancy. But Groundhog Day positively encourages this regression, since it stimulates that part of the brain first flexed in those kindergarten tutorials. A fellow guest greets Phil on the landing with a banal enquiry about the groundhog. This time, Phil dodges him and sweeps straight out of the door. The pulsing score has become more insistent now: it urges him on through the streets, imploring him to keep running. He nearly jumps out of his skin at the sight of the homeless man – no time to taunt him today – and shoves Ned off the pavement. Phil plunges straight into the pothole, then threads across the town square toward Rita and Larry. The ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ is starting to sound like a funeral march. He pulls Rita to one side, and Larry objects. ‘It’s a creative meeting,’ snorts Phil. ‘Forget it.’ How comforting that even in the midst of existential crisis he can find time to belittle Larry. Today, Phil won’t even play along with Rita. Instead of recording the broadcast again, he tells her to meet him in the diner. The film-makers know just when we’ve had enough of familiarity, and when to reward our

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patient eyes with a new scene: the establishing shot of the Tip Top Café brings a fillip, since it means that for the first time in almost ten minutes, we are going to be treated to something that we have not, in one form or another, already witnessed.74 Inside, Phil and Rita are seated at a window table. The walls are decorated, none too subtly, with clocks. The venetian blinds behind Phil provide another image of enclosure. After Rita asks for the check, the sound of crashing crockery can be heard from off-camera. What we may not realise at this point is that the film is once again establishing a template from which it will then be free to diverge in later scenes, playing repeatedly on our memories and expectations. A smattering of applause greets the crash, then the predictable responses – ‘Just put that anywhere, pal’, ‘Good save!’. Phil flinches at the noise. Finally he gropes toward a confession: ‘Rita, I am reliving the same day over and over. Groundhog Day. Today.’ But it doesn’t wash, and for the first time there is a tangible tension between them that isn’t played for laughs. Larry approaches the table: ‘Are you guys ready? We better get going if we’re gonna stay ahead of the weather.’ Phil’s not budging. Cut to an X-ray of Phil’s skull, pinned up in a doctor’s office. The doctor (played by Ramis) examines a string of X-rays and scans. Once again, Phil is shot against a backdrop of venetian blinds, which now enclose him even more starkly within a window frame. The doctor advises Phil and Rita in the diner

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a psychiatrist, and we cut straight to a close-up of the emaciated worrywart who is to preside over Phil’s state of mind. Unfortunately, he doesn’t grasp the gravity of his client’s problem. ‘I think we should meet again,’ he chirps. ‘How’s tomorrow for you?’ Phil is lying on the couch, his horizontal position echoing the repeated bed shots that begin each Groundhog Day, and pointing toward the later image of him spread out on the mortuary slab. He places a cushion over his own face and pounds it repeatedly in wordless frustration. Already you can feel how much fun the film-makers are having. Far from being constrictive, the one-day time frame has given them the liberty to roam freely, sniffing out idiosyncratic digressions and details that could not have been countenanced in a linear narrative. It would be overrating the movie to suggest that it is comparable with Joyce’s Ulysses. But it is true that the emancipation Joyce enjoyed within the temporal and spatial limitations of that novel resurfaces in some form in Groundhog Day, which also bends a linear medium to breaking point. In place of Joyce’s Dublin is Punxsutawney; the day in question is not 16 June 1904, but 2 February (give or take a few stray hours in the preceding and succeeding days) in the early 1990s. And while Joyce burrowed inwards through his characters’ bodily functions, desires and daydreams, Ramis and Rubin travel in the opposite direction, reducing to a daisy-chain of montages a period that spans at least a decade. Murray and Ramis

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But part of the thrill of Groundhog Day, as with Ulysses, comes from the friction between scale and incident, form and content. Joyce invoked the conventions of the Greek epic to inform and enlarge 24 hours torn from everyday life. Consider by comparison the unique pleasures of Groundhog Day where a complex philosophical conundrum is addressed using only those analytical tools available to a mainstream Hollywood comedy – and addressed eloquently at that. Both works attend inherently to the significance of scale. The novel takes nearly 800 pages, and many conflicting styles and formats, to record a single day. The movie traverses entire years in a matter of seconds, allowing the time to drip away unnoticed like raindrops in the ocean. Film struggled for a long time to be regarded as a serious medium, but novelists might well look with envy at the blasé conflations of time in Groundhog Day, Toto the Hero (1991) or The Palm Beach Story (1940). Any narrative work must address the question of how best to represent the passing of time. Few movies take the risk of playing out their action in real time – beyond early Warhol, and one-offs such as Nick of Time (1995), Run Lola Run, Timecode (2000) or Russian Ark (2002), compression is as intrinsic to film narrative as the three-act structure. The television series 24 (2001–) has come closest to the pedantic representation of actual time, though the small portion of each episode that must be sacrificed to advertisements subtly threatens its verisimilitude. Even 24 has nothing on the druggy voodoo charms of Douglas Gordon’s 1993 installation 24-Hour Psycho, which reduces the progress of Hitchcock’s chiller to an eerie, unnatural crawl that takes a full day to reach its conclusion. Phil’s third day represents the first opportunity for the movie to shake loose of its roots and head for the clouds, and for cloudcuckooland. From the psychiatrist, Ramis cuts straight to another new location – a bowling alley where Phil is shooting the breeze disconsolately with Gus and Ralph, a pair of barflies who had featured earlier in the background at the Tip Top Café. What follows is one of the film’s key exchanges: PHIL:

What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was

exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? RALPH:

That about sums it up for me.

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Here, the film introduces the possibility that the time loop is pertinent not merely to Phil’s life. Ralph’s line is only theoretically funny – that is, it’s too near the knuckle to actually get the laugh that it deserves. Suzanne M. Daughton writes that ‘Phil’s situation, trapped in the time loop, parallels that of the economically disenfranchised, the Other.’75 Phil has considered himself above the Punxsutawney townsfolk with their petty joys and woes; now he must concede his kinship with them. In Ralph’s line, the film shifts down a gear, which may be one reason why it is followed almost immediately by a wham-bam, high-speed car chase. As Phil speeds off with Gus and Ralph, a discordant electric guitar squeals on the soundtrack, and is overridden by honky-tonk piano and brass. The composer is working hard to dispel the gloom of Ralph’s sorrowful admission that his life is going nowhere slowly. ‘What if there were no tomorrow?’ Phil asks his drinking buddies in the car. ‘No tomorrow,’ muses Gus. ‘We could do whatever we wanted!’ ‘That’s true,’ says Phil darkly. ‘We could do whatever we want.’ A police car gives chase, and Phil steers the car onto the railway line. The train’s blinding headlamp shines onto Phil, Gus and Ralph, lighting only the lower halves of their faces. The image calls to mind the illuminated mouth, isolated in the darkness, which delivers Beckett’s Not I. Or is it just that the spectre of that playwright haunts this film

Illuminated mouths

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so vividly that it is possible to discern his morbid traces wherever you look? During the car chase, Phil undergoes a transformation: he comes to appreciate the advantages of having his slate wiped clean each morning. Ramis has referred to Rubin’s use of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five ‘stages’ of death and dying in planning Phil’s path to enlightenment.76 The stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. ‘More has been made of that than is strictly accurate,’ explains Rubin. I was thinking through how it would work to repeat the same day, and it seemed to me that you would go in stages, each stage bleeding logically into the next. It felt similar to the stages laid out by Kübler-Ross. It wasn’t like I looked it up, or followed it to the letter, but it was in my head from reading her book, and when I explained it to Harold, it rang a bell for him too.77

For now, Phil is exploiting his predicament for maximum benefit. He’s laughing like a madman as he removes the car from the train’s path. ‘I’m not gonna live by their rules any more!’ he announces as he ploughs the vehicle into a giant wooden groundhog. He ends his third 2 February in prison. After repeated visual allusions to incarceration – in the TV studio, the bed-and-breakfast, and in the eye of Larry’s camera – Phil gets the real deal at last. The cell door bangs shut.

Caged

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2 February, Day 4: ‘I’m going to stay an extra day’ For the first time, one of Phil’s days in Punxsutawney begins without a close-up of the radio alarm clock. The camera is trained instead on the headboard. We hear the alarm kick in. Sonny and Cher are nearing the end of their bubblegum love song ‘I Got You Babe’. Phil sits up in bed. He looks around anxiously. As he throws back the sheets, the alteration in the film’s visual vocabulary, as well as in Phil’s behaviour, is striking. He gives a celebratory ‘Yesss!’ This is going to be a good day. Cut to Phil walking into the dining room downstairs, where classical music ebbs along behind the ripples of conversation. The landlady, Mrs Lancaster, goes to ask Phil if he slept well, but he pre-empts her question. ‘Slept like a baby, thank you,’ he says, before responding to her comments about the weather before she has even made them. ‘Was anybody looking for me here this morning?’ he asks. ‘Perhaps a state official – maybe a blue hat, gun, night-stick?’ No one had been. He’s off the hook. He takes Mrs Lancaster in a gruff embrace and presses a kiss on her startled, painted lips. ‘Will you hold my room for me, please? I’m going to stay an extra day.’ She adjusts her hair, and glances around to check whether anyone saw what happened – hoping, possibly, that somebody did. The homeless man is begging for dimes on the street corner. ‘Catch you tomorrow, huh Pop?’ Phil promises as he breezes past. Then we hear that voice, that ingratiating voice. ‘Phil? Hey, Phil?’ Phil looks elated. ‘Ned?’ he calls out, and throws a punch that spins Ned around in a spectacular 180-degree pirouette, so that his gobsmacked, goggle-eyed face is now pointed toward the camera for the few glorious seconds before he hits the ground. It’s the moment we have been waiting for: a literal punchline that releases the anxiety hoarded by Phil, and by us, over the ‘previous’ three days. To hear the euphoric response to that scene in a packed auditorium is to comprehend how tightly the film has got us coiled at this point. Leaving Ned, Phil goes to step in the pothole, but thinks better of it. He’s learning. He teeters at the kerb, watching contentedly as someone else gets to play schmuck for the day. There’s no need now for Ramis to even bother with the town square. He cuts straight from the pothole to the

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Tip Top Café. Phil and Rita are seated at a window table. The walls are decorated, none too subtly, with clocks. Phil has before him everything on the menu – custard tarts, a strawberry milkshake wearing a frothy wig, doughnuts thicker than tractor tyres. The sound of crashing crockery can be heard from off-camera. A smattering of applause greets the crash, then the predictable responses – ‘Just put that anywhere, pal’, ‘Good save!’. It’s Gus and Ralph, no longer the strangers to us, or to Phil, that they were the first time this scene was played out. Phil glugs coffee straight from the pot, then plucks a cigarette from the packet with his lips. (No one does concerted debauchery like Murray – this scene is rivalled only by the one in Rushmore in which he smokes two cigarettes at once and swigs whiskey from a Diet Coke can.) Rita chides him. But without the privileged knowledge shared by Phil and the audience, she can only seem prudish. Her disgust inspires him to plumb greater depths of grossness. He retrieves from the banquet a slice of angel cake that’s as hefty as a brick, and methodically crams it into his mouth, negotiating the corners so that it will not disintegrate before it is safely squeezed behind his teeth. This moment contains the essence of Bill Murray. It isn’t just the care and sensitivity with which he ensures that the passage of the angel cake is unimpeded, though that is fine enough, suggesting a conscientious deliveryman manoeuvring a tallboy through an unforgiving doorway. There is also Murray’s blithe repulsiveness to relish. Unlike Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy, who would wither like untended houseplants if the audience suspended its attention for a moment, Murray dares us to look away, walk out, switch off. Compare this shot to a similar one in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), which Ramis co-wrote, and you find an instructive insight into Murray’s appeal, as well as an illustration of the differences between him and his erstwhile Saturday Night Live colleague, John Belushi. In Animal House, Belushi can also be seen packing his mouth to bursting point at the canteen table. But it is the divergent pay-offs of these gags that are most revealing. Belushi squashes his own distended cheeks, showering his fellow diners with food. That, he reveals triumphantly, was

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his impression of a zit. Murray couldn’t play a scene like that. We wouldn’t believe for a moment that he could surrender the cake that he had worked so diligently to accommodate. Noticing Rita’s alarm, Phil asks simply: ‘What?’ It isn’t funny on the page: you must hear Murray deliver that line through a mouthful of cake; you must hear the word muffled by the intervening layers of sponge and cream. But it is enough to know that Belushi turned his aggression and anarchy outwards, literally splattering his audience with it; his early death from a drugs overdose was, in its way, characteristically messy. Murray, on the other hand, focuses the rancid negativity inwards. It isn’t exactly buried – it leaks and dribbles and oozes out of those pores that gape like

The slob kings: Murray and James Belushi in National Lampoon’s Animal House (John Landis / Universal Pictures, 1978)

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holes in a slab of Emmenthal. Belushi was cuddly and comforting, no matter that he was badly behaved, and death has softened further the rough edges of his image. Murray is still going. But his performances just keep getting sadder. You can trace it back to Quick Change, in which he played Grimm, who dresses as a clown to rob a bank. ‘What the hell kind of clown are you?’ snorts the security guard. ‘The crying-on-the-inside kind, I guess,’ reflects Grimm. Ramis has spoken of his attempt in Groundhog Day to recast Murray as ‘a very traditional American hero, of the kind … played by Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda’.78 Even putting aside the fact that Murray could never be a Henry Fonda figure – apart from the Fonda of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – this was a misguided ambition. Pauline Kael, who had retired from reviewing before Groundhog Day was released, was aghast. ‘I wish he wouldn’t,’ she objected. I think that’s a terrible mistake. We don’t need another Capraesque hero. That’s one of the problems with Groundhog Day – it’s charming but it has an old-fashioned quality. We like Murray because of his oddity and because he seems so fundamentally untrustworthy. There’s something grungy to the soul that he knows how to work and it’s wonderful.79

In this section of the film, Murray’s jubilant seediness comes off him like a bad smell, heightened by the fragrant presence of Andie MacDowell. She has clearly been directed to play Rita as pure, but it is one of the film’s intriguing, and possibly accidental, peculiarities that her radiance is outshone by Murray’s amoral blankness. Kael sniffed at the picture’s ‘old-fashioned quality’, but it’s less enamoured of people than it appears to be. There is just enough room between the characters on screen, and our interpretation of them, to allow for a whiff of doubt to complicate the film’s perfumed aroma. The early script directions might refer unironically to Rita as ‘a genuine princess’80 but when Phil bitterly gives her that label in the movie, it feels achingly right: she has the prissiness of a spoiled daddy’s girl. This makes their eventual courtship delectable – Phil might, in calmer moments, refer to

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her as an ‘angel’, but we come away from the film believing that they could be prickly enough to deserve one another. Larry presents a more obvious example of the ambivalence that hovers over the supporting characters. Phil hardly gives him a break, and neither does the movie. Larry, who in Rubin’s original script was ‘an old union guy’,81 is shown to be uptight (‘Nobody honks this horn except for me,’ he warns Phil in the van) and miserly (he leaves a $2 tip as he is exiting the bar with Nancy, then subtracts a dollar when her eyes are averted). It can’t help that he’s played by Chris Elliott, later employed as a walking carbuncle in films such as There’s Something about Mary (1997) and Scary Movie 2 (2001). In fact, the single implausible moment in the film occurs much later, when Phil strikes up a genial conversation with Larry – ‘We never talk … do you have kids?’ A time loop we can believe in. But the idea of Larry bonding with anyone requires too great a suspension of disbelief. Larry interrupts Phil’s banquet: ‘Are you guys ready? We better get going if we’re gonna stay ahead of the weather.’ Phil isn’t budging. Rita leaves with Larry, and we cut unexpectedly to a dolly shot prowling through the café toward a woman seated at another table. Phil overtakes the camera and sits down. Without introducing himself, he manages to squeeze out of her three personal details: her name, the high school she attended, and her twelfth-grade English teacher. Phil repeats the answers back to her like a mantra, then leaves.

Hitting on Nancy

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2 February, Day 5: ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ Cut to an extreme close-up of the radio alarm clock. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. But we don’t hear Sonny and Cher. Instead, Ramis layers the opening bars of the ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ over the image, before cutting to a wide shot of Phil sitting up in bed. The disruption of the musical convention to which we had become accustomed is as jarring as the absence in the previous day of any shots of the clock. Ramis utilises film language absolutely to its maximum, using nothing more complicated than the order of shots to create complex dramatic effects. No need either to visit the dining room for another encounter with Mrs Lancaster, or to bother with Rita and Larry. We cut straight to the square, where Phil approaches Nancy, the woman from the diner. After first testing the tautness of his ruse (‘You don’t remember me, do you?’), he uses the information with which he had armed himself the ‘previous’ day to convince her that they attended school together. Anyone who is convinced that the film leans too heavily toward quaintness should remember that Phil’s treachery here – gathering personal information for illicit ends – is consistent with the behaviour of a stalker. He’s like Arno Strine, the ithyphallic protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Fermata, who uses his ability to freeze time in order to gather personal details about women, which he later employs as icebreakers. Discovering, for instance, that a stranger has written in her diary. ‘Sexiness of men who take off their watches in public’, he is then able to exploit this knowledge once he has restored the temporal flow.82 Arno and Phil are not the first men to be dishonest in the pursuit of sex, but their manner of deceit is a breed of date rape. ‘When I wrote that scene,’ says Rubin, I was thinking of a certain kind of guy I knew in the 1980s. They were only interested in bagging whatever babe for that night because they could. The only thing I missed out on purpose that might have been more real is a dark stage: Phil never really goes through the kind of black period that would be the obvious flipside to that adolescent state that he’s in at first. If you live in a world without consequences, you could get away with anything. You could

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be really immoral. You could murder people, do awful things, just to see what would happen. When I wrote the script, we had just had our first baby, and I was in a happy, upbeat mood with the world. I thought: ‘Who do you want to direct this? David Lynch? No!’ So I didn’t go there.83

Perhaps the term ‘Capraesque’ has been misapplied. Even It’s a Wonderful Life has its share of sourness. The writer Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show [1994], Donnie Brasco [1997]) said: I’ve always loved in It’s a Wonderful Life that Lionel Barrymore doesn’t get his comeuppance. He is still head of the bank at the end. Capra’s darkness is overlooked.84

Phil sleeps with Nancy, safe in the knowledge that the marriage proposal offered to trick her into bed will be null and void by dawn. So ends Phil’s fifth 2 February, in which his biggest accomplishment has been to trick a woman into sex. In terms of screen time, it has been the shortest of the days played out so far. The exact breakdown of each 2 February is as follows: Day 1: 10 minutes, 26 seconds Day 2: 6 minutes, 45 seconds Day 3: 8 minutes, 50 seconds Day 4: 4 minutes, 3 seconds Day 5: 2 minutes, 8 seconds The close of Day 5 represents the last time until the final sequence that the movie assigns Phil’s actions to a specific day: after this, the weeks, months, years, decades blur into one another, and we can never be entirely sure where in the loop we are, or how old Phil really is. Arno in The Fermata doesn’t cease to age simply because he has stopped time: he will eventually assume the appearance of an old man despite being, to all intents and purposes, somewhere in his thirties. Phil, on the other hand, is completely restored each morning, with not a grey

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hair to show for the years that he has idled away in Punxsutawney. Strange, though, that while his gravestone will one day bear the dates of his birth and death, those inscriptions will not tell the whole story. Phil will in fact be much older than anyone can imagine: The Picture of Dorian Gray without the picture. The movie has allegiances to a number of species of philosophical cinema. There is the endlessly satisfying loop movie, where the action turns in on itself repeatedly: Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), in which the heroines are compelled to keep returning to a mansion where a murder mystery is being played out, endeavouring on each visit to interrupt the macabre course of events; or The Tenant (1976) and The Shining (1980), Lost Highway and La Jetée (1962), where the narrative concludes with its own beginning – or rather, never concludes. Groundhog Day is almost part of that group, and would have earned full membership if Ramis had seen fit to retain Rubin’s original ending. In that version, Phil wakes beside Rita to find himself freed from the 2 February loop, only to discover that Rita is stuck in her own loop, and is heartily sick of waking up next to him again and again on 3 February. Here, Rubin’s use of voiceover would also have made sublime sense, since at this moment of cataclysmic revelation, the voiceover duties would have shifted from Phil to Rita. The movie also belongs to that strain of film-making that forces its protagonist to create the narrative, rather than simply observe it. Think of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Sherlock Jr (1924), in which the boundaries between cinema and spectator become literally fluid, or Panic Room (2002), where a passive character can only guarantee her survival by changing from ‘viewer’ to ‘director’, manipulating the lighting, performers and mise en scène to gain the upper hand over her tormentors. As Phil painstakingly harvests information about daily life in Punxsutawney, he too graduates to the role of director. He pre-empts wearily everything that will happen: ‘A gust of wind. A dog barks. Cue the truck.’ Cue the truck. It doesn’t come much more blatant than that. And he has most clearly become the master of his own movie when he introduces Rita to the staff and customers of the Tip Top Café, giving each of them their

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individual ‘motivation’ or ‘back-story’. To prove to Rita that he knows what will happen next, he even writes down Larry’s ‘line’ before Larry says it. But what makes Groundhog Day so melancholy, and so fitting a subject for cinema, is that it investigates the kind of sanctuary from life represented by filmgoing – at least for this filmgoer. In The Fermata, Arno refers to his frozen time as ‘the Fold’ and observes that, while overtaking a vehicle on the freeway, we all occupy ‘that place where passing cars don’t exist – a kind of Fold-effect of the rear- and side-view mirrors’.85 Cinema can be another kind of ‘Fold’. The best cinema experiences can make you feel as though you have absconded from the real world, maintaining only the most tenuous link with reality. The films are almost incidental. The act of stealing away into the darkness, into that other flickering world, can be magical enough for some of us. This is one of the reasons that it’s possible to respond so viscerally to Groundhog Day, and to other movies that offer a snapshot of lives freed, even temporarily, from daily existence. The wistful Next to No Time (1958), for example, is a modest precursor to Groundhog Day. A timid English businessman (Kenneth More) takes advantage of the single hour during a crossing to New York when the clocks are stopped as the ship passes through the time zones, and uses it to approach clients with his proposals. The idea is that, as with Phil’s endless Groundhog Days, nothing really counts during that hour, so there is nothing to lose. Next to No Time is based on The Enchanted Hour, a story by Paul Gallico, who cowrote another of cinema’s loveliest daydreams – The Clock (1945), a romantic fancy in which Judy Garland enjoys a fleeting romance with a soldier (Robert Walker) on leave in New York. The film’s poignancy, and the sympathy it extends to people who take refuge in life’s margins, lives on in Richard Linklater’s heartbreaking Before Sunrise (1995) – a title that, along with Next to No Time and The Clock, would have suited Ramis’s film if Groundhog Day had already been taken.

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5 Days without End From now until the final 2 February, the film takes the form of a series of montages summarising Phil’s mood changes. As a ‘Keystone’ security van draws up in front of the bank, Phil announces what will happen as though he is reading stage directions: ‘Exit Felix, and stand there with a not-sobright look on your face.’ He has memorised the lines of every player. ‘“Felix?” “How you doing, Doris?” “Can I have a roll of quarters?”’ The DVD chapter selections wrongly define this as Day 6, but how can it be when Phil has not had time on any previous days to scrutinise this ritual so closely? Make no mistake: his observations are the work of many arduous hours of study. Phil has a whole humdrum exterior existence from which we have been suddenly excluded. After following him at such close quarters, we cannot help but experience a slump upon discovering this ellipsis. Phil appears to be in the same slump: even the task of stealing from the security truck doesn’t animate his deathly face. He is not so different really from Cassandra – while he can alter events to some degree, those alterations have no lasting effect. Futility in a narrative medium such as cinema becomes particularly powerful, since it undermines the entire concept of editing and narrative. What better expression of futility than a film in which each scene has no impact on the next? Phil pulls up outside the Alpine Theater dressed as Clint Eastwood, with poncho and cigar, announced by Ennio Morricone-style music. Nancy walks past, ignoring him. ‘My old fiancée,’ he says pensively. ‘She doesn’t remember me.’ Another morning. Rita is watching the tape of Phil’s report on a pair of monitors in the van, with Phil’s image repeated across the two screens. For the first time, Phil shows some affection toward her. He takes her to the Tip Top Café. Inside, they are seated at a window table. The walls are decorated, none too subtly, with clocks. Rita is talking about what she wants from life – ‘career, love, marriage, children’. She lists the attributes that would define her perfect partner. It’s an approximate representation of what could be referred to as a ‘New Man’ – ‘He’s kind, sensitive,

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gentle. He’s not afraid to cry in front of me’ – but Phil is scornful: ‘This is a man we’re talking about, right?’ However, if he is to break free of the time loop, it is precisely this kind of man that he will need to become. Sure enough, he has by the end of the film developed talents and characteristics that could be said to put him on first-name terms with his feminine side. He learns to play piano, speak French and appreciate fine literature. Convincingly and without malice, he feigns love for another man. He can also be seen wearing a waistcoat. Danny Rubin denies that there is any significance to Phil’s initials, but even a superficial reading of the movie bears out the idea that Phil must exchange outdated (and non-PC) patriarchal and chauvinistic traditions for a new openness if he is to emerge from the past (and become PC). This was, after all, the 1990s, when even James Bond could plausibly be labelled a ‘relic’ by his own (female) boss in the borderline iconoclastic GoldenEye (1995). Groundhog Day has something in common too with the ‘Yuppie’ movies of the 1980s, in which stiffs like Jeff Daniels in Something Wild (1986) and Rosanna Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan (1984) undergo a drastic transformation after an encounter with ‘the Other’, and must deconstruct and rebuild their own personalities (or, in the case of Griffin Dunne in After Hours [1985], literally be reborn) if they are to keep pace with a changed world. Phil divided

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Some commentators have compared the movie with another narrative exposing white masculine identity in jeopardy.86 Falling Down also opened in early 1993, but when the violent, middle-aged hero of that film (Michael Douglas) is faced with the choice of ‘adapt or die’, he ultimately plumps for the latter. It can be said that Phil too chooses to die, though this option is not open to him, at least not permanently. So he changes. He becomes a better person. But only after – not before – he has sampled the varying pleasures of hedonism, misanthropy, suicide. That fact survives robustly any derisive comparison to Capra that can be invoked. Once again, the bachelor auction with which Ramis chooses to end the film seems like a stroke of genius when placed in the context of the theme of political correctness. In presenting masculinity as a commodity to be bartered for by women who need no longer make a secret of their appetites, the auction serves a more radical function than the wedding that was to have ended the last 2 February. Weddings in comedies, especially screwball comedies, of which Groundhog Day is a demented example, bring restorative powers: they reassure the audience that the balance of sexual power has been maintained, regardless of the chaos that has gone before. The auction, on the other hand, does the opposite. It throws gender roles into confusion, and tests whether Phil’s ‘New Man’ credentials are up to scratch. Will PC be PC enough to pass muster?

Michael Douglas in Falling Down (Joel Shumacher / Warner Bros., Le Studio Canal+, Regency Enterprises / Warner Home Video, 1992)

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For now, he clearly has little chance with Rita. We see him tinkering secretly with the van so that she will have no choice but to remain with him in Punxsutawney. Then Ramis cuts to the hotel bar that evening for the first of the film’s delightful rapid-fire montages that compress days and weeks into mere seconds. Phil orders himself a drink, and asks Rita her preference. ‘Sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist, please.’ Phil nods to himself. The ‘next’ evening, Phil anticipates Rita’s order by requesting sweet vermouth for himself. They exchange startled looks. ‘What shall we drink to?’ asks Rita. ‘To the groundhog!’ chirps Phil. Wrong answer. ‘I always drink to world peace,’ she says contemptuously. Phil mouths the words ‘world peace’ to himself before smarting at the tang of the vermouth on his tongue. Cut to the identical scene, the ‘next’ evening. Now Phil piously suggests drinking to world peace, even muttering an ‘amen’ before raising the glass to his lips. This time it works a treat, because Phil and Rita are soon in a restaurant, coming to the end of their meal. ‘Believe it or not,’ says Rita, ‘I studied 19th century French poetry.’ Phil unleashes a mocking laugh. ‘What a waste of time!’ he hoots. Rita recoils instantly. ‘I mean,’ says Phil hurriedly, ‘for someone else that would be an incredible waste of time …’ You can feel his panic as he watches all hope of sex or affection leak out of the evening. The ‘next’ evening, Phil and Rita are again coming to the end of their meal. ‘Believe it or not,’ says Rita, ‘I studied 19th century French poetry.’ Phil grows reflective, and quotes Jacques Brel: La fille qui j’aimerai Sera comme bon vin Qui se bonifiera Un peu chaque matin.87

This translates as ‘The girl who I will love / Is like a good wine / Which gets a little better / Each morning’ – a fitting and bittersweet choice

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considering the amount of mornings that Phil has had to contemplate Rita. ‘You speak French?’ she asks, amazed and appreciative. ‘Oui.’ Later that evening in the square, Phil and Rita are making a snowman when they get involved in a snowball fight with a group of passing children. As the kids flee under a hail of snowballs, Rita and Phil collapse on the ground and stare meaningfully into one another’s eyes. ‘You Don’t Know Me’ strikes up on the soundtrack, pre-empting a crucial line in the next scene, and we cut to a long shot of the gazebo, where Phil and Rita dance as the snow falls at the edges of the frame. They walk through the blue, icy streets back to the bed-and-breakfast. A white picket fence glows luminously beside them. Back in his room, they kiss passionately. Phil is exuding desperation; he knows that, if he blows it, if he makes one mistake, the entire day’s work will have been squandered. We feel anxious too, because we know he can do nothing except short-circuit this moment – it’s in his wiring. ‘You’re moving a little too fast for me,’ complains Rita, wriggling free of his paws. He tries valiantly to cling on to her, but she has already slipped through his fingers, and things can only turn nasty now. In the grip of madness, he blurts out that he loves her. ‘You don’t even know me!’ she shoots back. ‘Oh, I–I know you,’ he says darkly. ‘I know you.’ A subtly sinister chord trespasses on the romantic music. They argue and Rita slaps him. ‘That’s for making me care about you,’ she hisses. The ‘next’ evening in the square, Phil and Rita are building a snowman by moonlight. Phil is giving another outing to the same banter that he used in the ‘previous’ night, only now it is rusted with neediness. A snowball fight ensues with a group of passing children. As the kids flee, Rita and Phil collapse on the ground and Phil tries unsuccessfully to manoeuvre his body into the same position that led miraculously to a kiss from Rita ‘last’ night. The snow crunches beneath him. Hope is dribbling away. Cut to a montage of eight different slaps from Rita. That’s at least nine evenings that Phil has sacrificed to the task of trying to get Rita into bed. Murray’s splendidly barren face is the focus for much of the pain in Groundhog Day – it becomes a screen onto which the action is projected,

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and only once, when he strikes Ned, does he dish out the violence to which he is subjected. The attack on Ned, like all the film’s violence, is no more real than the lump that protrudes from Wile E. Coyote’s head after he has been struck by a falling anvil, or the pain of Tom the cat’s crumbling teeth following a thump in the mouth with a sledgehammer. But the emptiness of violence here is precisely the point. When Mel Gibson out-runs a speeding car in Lethal Weapon (1987), despite having recently been beaten and electrocuted, it is not a comment on anything except the inherited ideals of masculinity intrinsic to the action genre. When Bill Murray walks away unharmed from a car wreck, or wakes up in bed after a dive from a tall building, there is no discernible note of triumph. His ongoing survival can only represent despair. Ramis moves from the last evening in the ‘slap’ montage, which ends with Phil walking past a row of ice sculptures on his way back to the bedand-breakfast, to what is presumably the ‘next’ day. We can see from his face, and the apathy with which he trudges through the crowds in the town square, that he got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. But there is no right side. ‘You look terrible,’ Rita tells him. A close-up of his dejected, puffy face, on which he seems to be wearing the pain of each of those nine slaps, substantiates her observation. An extreme close-up of the digits on Phil’s alarm clock reveals that it’s 5.59 again. It takes an eternity for the flaps to fall and alter the reading to 6.00. A low, whooshing sound effect, coupled with the distorting powers of the low-angle close-up, give the impression that time itself is crushing Phil. You can feel the temperature drop in the cinema at this point as the audience begins to comprehend that Murray isn’t clowning around any more. No Sonny and Cher. No inane DJs. Instead Phil parrots their patter in a despondent timbre. ‘OK campers, rise and shine,’ he murmurs, ‘and don’t forget your booties ’cos it’s cold out there today. It’s cold out there every day.’ The camera is staring down on Phil. He looks fit for the worms. In the recreation room, Phil, Mrs Lancaster and some guests are watching Jeopardy!. Phil is in his pyjamas, lazily munching popcorn and swigging Jack Daniels. He reels off the answers before the questions have

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finished being asked, though his deathly delivery suggests that speaking requires more effort than he can summon. The guests applaud his success. Mrs Lancaster looks warily at him. He stares back at her with empty eyes. Most of the cuts made by Ramis to Rubin’s first revision dispensed with exaggerated or repeated versions of scenes that would find their way into the finished film. A notable exception is the montage of escape attempts in which Phil sees how far away from Punxsutawney he can get within his 24-hour window. In the original script, he had even made it to Ohio to visit his mother. ‘I thought that was very funny,’ says Rubin. ‘You know when you visit your mother it’s always like replaying the same old tapes over and over again. Not my mother, of course, but other Bad days

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people’s.’88 The scene with Phil’s mother doesn’t make it into the first revision. But after being repeatedly thwarted by the blizzard, he does get as far as Altoona airport, where he studies a pilot’s manual and makes an escape bid in a private plane. The aircraft is last seen dangling ‘upside down in a large tree’.89 It’s a dotty image in an inspired sequence, but Ramis had sound reasons for cutting it. ‘It seemed much better to me to heighten the claustrophobic quality of the whole thing by keeping him in town,’ he said. ‘Also, we didn’t want the audience constantly questioning what the rules were – we didn’t want people involved in the technicalities of it.’90 After his grim demonstration of general knowledge, Phil is next seen in the town square. Rita and Larry look appalled as Phil harangues the town officials: ‘You’re hypocrites, all of ya!’ What follows is the film’s most piercing address, directed at Rita. Am I upsetting you, Princess? You know, you want a prediction about the weather, you’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold. It’s gonna be grey. And it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.

The camera holds the close-up of Phil for longer than is comfortable. There is no cutaway to a reaction shot of Rita – nothing to dilute Phil’s invective. We fear for Rita, and for Phil. Back to the radio alarm clock on the bedside table. The time is 6.00. The alarm kicks in. Sonny and Cher. A hand comes into view and knocks the clock from the table. Cut to an extreme close-up of the numbers on a radio alarm clock. The time is 5.59. No – 6.00. The alarm. Sonny and Cher. In a wider shot, Phil leans forward and pummels the clock with his fist. Another extreme close-up of the radio alarm clock shows that the time is 5.59. No – 6.00. Sonny and Cher. In a wider shot, Phil lifts the clock from the table and smashes it against the floor. It is in pieces, but Sonny and Cher are droning on, sounding now as though they are drowning.

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In the town square, Phil delivers his segment as the ceremony gets under way behind him. ‘Once again the eyes of the nation have turned here to this [descends into mocking sing-song voice] tiny village in Western Pennsylvania, blah-bah-blah-bah-blah.’ Phil decides, with a palpable flash of psychotic inspiration, that his namesake is to blame. ‘He’s gotta be stopped. And I have to stop him.’ Phil approaches Rita by the van. ‘I’ve come to the end of me, Rita,’ he says gravely. ‘There’s no way out now. I just want you to remember we had a beautiful day together.’ Of course she won’t remember: she knows only the Phil who made a crude pass at her the previous night. He kisses her sadly on the cheek, and exits the shot. Once again, as with the end of Day 3, drastic measures are needed to temper the bleakness of Phil’s predicament. And as before, the filmmakers resort to a car chase, perhaps reasoning that no amount of gloom can survive that rambunctious convention. Phil jumps behind the steering wheel of a waiting truck. The groundhog is in a cage beside him on the passenger seat. As the truck speeds off, Buster gives chase in his own vehicle, while a police car follows, and Rita and Larry bring up the rear in the van. Phil is driving, with the groundhog on his lap. He’s being flip again now – ‘You gotta check your mirrors,’ he is telling his passenger – but there’s a rawness to him, and his gags have the ring of gallows humour. A road sign reads: ‘No Outlet’. No kidding. Goodbye Sonny and Cher – for now

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Eventually finding himself cornered, Phil turns to the groundhog. ‘Well, we mustn’t keep our public waiting, huh?’ he mutters sourly. ‘It’s showtime, Phil.’ To the astonishment of the witnesses, including Larry, who is filming the whole thing, Phil drives the truck over the edge of the cliff. It falls serenely through the air, turning onto its roof, and crashes into the quarry below. Rita and Larry rush to the edge. A fireball engulfs the vehicle, and the camera zooms back, as though genuinely surprised by the premature death of the film’s leading man. A second shot of the burning truck, taken now from ground level, dissolves into an extreme close-up of the numbers on a radio alarm clock. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. The alarm kicks in. Sonny and Cher. Cut to a wide shot. Phil sits up in bed. ‘Aw, nuts,’ he complains quietly to himself. Downstairs, classical music ebbs along behind the ripples of conversation. Phil walks into the dining room in his pyjamas. Ignoring Mrs Lancaster’s chitchat, he plods over to the toaster, unplugs it, and disappears back upstairs. In the bathroom, he plugs it in and climbs into a tub of water. Without bothering to remove the four slices of bread still in the appliance, he switches it on and lifts it above the water. In the dining room, Mrs Lancaster gasps as the lights fuse. On a Punxsutawney road, Phil steps out from the pavement and into the path of a truck. The camera, assuming the truck’s POV, speeds toward him. Blackout. The camera pans up the courthouse. Phil is standing at the top – he lets himself fall gently forward, and dives into the blue sky with his arms outstretched. Cut to a close-up of his body lying in the morgue. The mortician draws back the sheet to reveal Phil. The camera pans up to Rita who whispers ‘That’s him’ as she turns and clings to Larry. Phil’s doughy, bloodless face stares at us in close-up. Rarely are we forced to confront so starkly the extinction of a main character. For Anthony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black (1998), death is a stroll across a bridge. For Patrick Swayze in Ghost (1990), it is a shower of silvery light. Titanic (1997) allows its drowned hero one last outing in his dinner suit. The suicide montage in Groundhog Day lasts less than two

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minutes, but its effect on the film is momentous.91 Which isn’t to say that the picture can’t recover from it. One of the things that makes it so shocking is the breeziness with which Ramis cuts straight from the morgue to a close-up of Rita in the Tip Top Café, talking to Phil. What the film doesn’t dwell on is the fact that Phil now knows what lies in store for us after death. It can’t even be said that the day whizzes back to its dawn once he has expired, since the morgue scene testifies that time continues for the other characters even after Phil is dead. Only external life is restored at the start of each 2 February; Phil’s memory remains unwiped. He must, therefore, remember something about death – its pain, its mysteries. But he’s not telling, and neither is the film. Another ambiguity to complicate the happy ending to come. We’re in the diner. Phil is quantifying the means by which he has been extinguished, and the impression that he has lived many more days than we have witnessed is enhanced by the mention of several forms of death (‘stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung …’) that have not been represented on screen. ‘I’ve killed myself so many times,’ he says later, ‘I don’t even exist any more.’ Now begins Phil’s first successful attempt to convince Rita that he is stuck in a loop. He grabs the waitress. ‘This is Doris … more than anything else, she wants to see Paris before she dies.’ Doris doesn’t ask how he knows, she just whoops in agreement. Phil moves on to everyone

Phil on the slab

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Three deaths

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else in the diner – this woman is having second thoughts about her wedding, this waiter is gay (‘I am!’ he trills happily, though in the script he flatly denies it92). Rita accuses Phil of playing tricks, and he replies: ‘Maybe the real God uses tricks. Maybe he’s not omnipotent, he’s just been around so long, he knows everything.’ Phil then predicts that a waiter will drop a tray of crockery – and he does. A smattering of applause greets the crash, followed by the predictable responses. Phil lists to Rita all the things that he knows about her; and his adoration shades slowly into sadness when he admits that he’s stuck ‘and there’s nothing I can do about it’. He is doomed to leave no lasting imprint. He’s like the hero of Memento (2000), who hoards stacks of corroborating

Phil the director gives his actors their back stories

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Polaroids to compensate for his lack of short-term memory. Or Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, scrambling to find evidence that they existed yesterday. All these characters want only to look over their shoulder and find the footprints that will testify to their time on earth. ‘Larry’s gonna come through that door and take you away from me,’ Phil tells Rita. ‘But you can’t let him.’ He writes down what Larry will say. Sure enough, Larry delivers his line. Rita is convinced. She decides to spend the rest of the day with Phil – ‘just to see what happens’. That night, they are in Phil’s bedroom, throwing cards into a hat. Phil has perked up considerably; he’s thawing out. But he’s not deluded. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘you will have forgotten all about this, and you’ll treat me like a jerk again.’ By 3.02 a.m., Rita has fallen asleep to the sound of Phil reading poetry. He’s no longer a pick-up artist. He won’t be putting the moves on Rita. We understand this when he compliments her while she’s sleeping, knowing full well that he is the only one who can hear those words, and that there will be no trace of them in less than three hours’ time. The radio alarm clock reads 5.59. No – 6.00. We hear Sonny singing ‘Then put your little hand in mine …’ The camera pulls back slowly to the left. The inane DJ patter floods the song. ‘OK campers, rise and shine …’ Phil goes to the window; he turns to camera and stands, for a moment, in contemplation. On the street corner the homeless man is begging for dimes. Phil hands him a wad of notes. In the town square, Phil threads through the celebrating crowds toward Rita and Larry. He is smiling now, and armed with coffee and pastries for his colleagues. Back in the diner, Phil is sitting alone, reading contentedly. He smiles at the piano music on the radio. Cut to him arriving at the house of the piano teacher. When she says that she’s busy with a student, he offers her a thousand dollars. She invites him in and shoves her young pupil into the street. The ‘next’ morning, a fellow guest at the bed-and-breakfast greets Phil on the landing with a banal enquiry about the groundhog. Phil kisses him on both cheeks. We then see Phil at the piano, falteringly practising his scales. Next, he is ice-sculpting an angel, while bystanders including Rita and Larry look on amazed. Then another piano lesson – Phil is

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playing Rachmaninoff ’s ‘Eighteenth Variation on a Theme of Paganini’.93 He’s improving as a pianist, and as a person. Rubin had originally signalled Phil’s maturity in a scene between him and a cocksure teenager with whom he shoots hoops. ‘Everybody worrying about my future,’ says the kid. ‘I say, “Hey! Don’t worry about my future. I’m gonna buy a big car and wreck it. I’m gonna date every pretty girl in Pennsylvania. I’m gonna make lots of money. And I’m gonna live forever.”’94 Rubin regrets its exclusion from the finished film. ‘I don’t know why it didn’t make it,’ he says. I like how you could see in this 14-year-old kid pretty much the same person Phil was at the beginning of the movie. And through that encounter he understands how far he has come. I thought it was an important realisation that really wasn’t made in any other way in the movie, but what can you do?95

The next person to feel Phil’s newfound warmth is Ned. We hear that voice, that ingratiating voice. Here he comes, clutching a creepylooking briefcase. Phil greets him with an embrace. ‘I have missed you so much,’ he coos sincerely, before cradling him for an uncomfortably long time. ‘I don’t know where you’re heading,’ continues Phil, ‘but can you call in sick?’ Ned plainly doesn’t have the vocabulary to process an experience like this. He groans his excuses and scampers away.

Bubblegum Rachmaninoff

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Dissolve to the same street, later that night. The homeless man is stumbling wearily in the dark. ‘Hello father,’ says Phil. ‘Let’s get you some place warm.’ The use of ‘father’, with its religious connotations, is interesting here, though it doesn’t feature in Rubin’s first revision; in that draft, religion had a forceful presence in the scene in which Phil visits a church and says: ‘Please help me. I don’t know what to do. Lord? …’96 In the hospital, a nurse tells Phil that the man has died. Phil storms in and yanks back the cubicle curtain – a replay of the scene in the shower, shaded now with sadness. We don’t see the corpse: we know well enough by now what a corpse looks like. ‘Sometimes people just die,’ says the

Phil and ‘Father’

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nurse. ‘Not today,’ replies Phil with muted authority (or, as Rubin’s draft has it, ‘Not on my watch’97). The ‘next’ day, Phil takes the old man to the diner. The man is slurping soup that Phil has bought him. But later that night, Phil is hunched over the man’s body in an alley, trying frantically to resuscitate him, imploring him to breathe. The man expels a final breath. Phil gazes forlornly at the sky. The Last 2 February: ‘What did you do today?’ This will transpire to be Phil’s final 2 February in Punxsutawney – and, at 12 minutes and 12 seconds, the longest single day in terms of screen time. Now it’s time to do it all over again. Once more with feeling.

Phil as Superman

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Phil is delivering his segment in the town square as the officials and revellers look on attentively. Other reporters are crowded around, preferring to record his speech than deliver their own. ‘When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life …’ The moment could have been mock sombre, but Murray plays it straight; for all his glorious insincerity, he can drop the glibness when he needs to. Of course he can. He’s an actor. The crowd applauds warmly. Larry has tears in his eyes. Rita asks Phil to join her for a coffee but he declines – he has some errands to run. He walks, then sprints, along an empty street. It turns out that he has to make it to a specific tree in time to catch a boy who is about to fall from it. We haven’t witnessed this scene before, and it provides further evidence of those days not documented by the screenplay. Much of the quickfire montage that follows falls into the same category: changing a flat tyre for a trio of elderly women; rushing into the restaurant in time to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on Buster, then instinctively lighting a woman’s cigarette on his way out. It’s funny once. But remember – Phil has been rushing to the rescue of these people every day. Rubin’s first revision included even more examples of Phil’s good deeds – pumping the stomach of Janey, a lovesick girl who has attempted suicide; removing an old lady from the path of a truck – but the real ingenuity comes when he devises some short cuts to help maximise his limited hours. He places a rock in the road so that the lorry carrying the fish to the restaurant – the fish that Buster will later choke on – will not make its delivery. He tells Janey that the object of her affection has feelings for her. And he puts chewing gum on the pavement to delay the old woman on her way to the road.98 In the bar of the Pennsylvanian Hotel, later that night, the Groundhog Festival Banquet is taking place. Larry is trying, and failing, to seduce Nancy. Rita makes her way into the main hall, where partygoers are dancing to feverish, light-headed rhythm-and-blues commandeered by a pounding piano. It’s Phil at the keys, in dark glasses. Spotting Rita, he

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raises his shades and brings the band to a halt, before sliding into a few seconds of Rachmaninoff and then leading the musicians into another number. Phil’s piano teacher is in the audience, declaring ‘He’s my student’ and ‘I’m so proud.’ She’s right, of course – she taught him everything he knows. But her pride suggests a rare lapse of continuity, since she can only have remembered teaching him for a few hours at most, and can hardly share the credit for his virtuoso performance. Only a killjoy, though, could not be swept along by the brilliant excesses of this climactic, celebratory sequence in which Phil is revealed to have doled out good deeds to everyone in Punxsutawney, including a

Phil at the auction

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woman who addresses him as ‘Dr Connors’ and thanks him for fixing her husband’s back. ‘What did you do today?’ gawps Rita. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he deadpans. Buster brandishes his gavel and presides over the bachelor auction. Doris, the waitress from the Tip Top Café, hauls Phil on stage. The women become frenzied, until Rita trumps them all and scoops Phil by bidding $339.88. Rita walks through the crowd and claims Phil from the stage by extending her dainty hand. Larry is up next for auction, but the bids fail to exceed 25 cents. In the foyer, Ned Ryerson makes his final appearance. Earlier scripts

Rita the angel and the kiss that breaks the spell

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had placed Ned’s last scene at the very end of the movie, where he is punched by Max Tillinghast (in Rubin’s revision) and Larry (in Ramis’s) as he tries to secure a sale. The idea of Ned finally landing a sale is retained, but now Rita is drawn into the action. As one of his good deeds, Phil has bought almost every policy that Ned has to offer. ‘This is the best day of my life!’ booms Ned. ‘Mine too,’ Phil agrees. In his over-excitement the salesman tries to invite himself along to dinner with Phil and Rita. ‘Oh, let’s not spoil it!’ says Rita, taking over Phil’s sarcastic duties now that he has acquired a halo, and in the process proving that she too can draw blood when necessary. Ned takes it all in his stride, responding with a hearty laugh and an unearthly feline snarl. Outside, Phil makes an ice sculpture of Rita in the moonlight. As he reveals it to her, the yearning strings on the soundtrack predict that she is going to be impressed. This frozen representation of Rita provides the last of the film’s close-ups of ‘altered’ faces, but where the earlier examples – Phil shrieking as he flees the shower; Ned reeling toward the camera after being punched; the repeated shots of Phil being struck by Rita – had all revealed suffering, the sculpted face evokes serenity. ‘I know your face so well,’ he says. ‘I could’ve done it with my eyes closed.’ This is an example of what Pauline Kael regarded as a cop-out, a compromise of Murray’s persona, but to my mind there isn’t anything bogus about it. The best Murray performances carry with them a cargo of pain, since even at his most apathetic, he is a hair away from clinical depression. When he makes peace with that pain here, it feels entirely organic: ‘No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now, because I love you.’ They kiss, and it begins to snow. Phil has stopped looking for his footprints; he has ceased to concern himself with the rewards of tomorrow. He has learned simply to be. It’s hard to scoff, even if you think you should. If ever a film (and a hero) had earned its payoff through sheer concentrated donkeywork, it is this one.

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6 3 February We dissolve to an extreme close-up of a radio alarm clock. The time is 5.59. No – now it’s 6.00. The alarm kicks in. It’s Sonny and Cher, but it’s a different part of the song. The camera pans left and comes to rest on a close-up of Phil opening his eyes. Rita’s arm moves into view, reaching across Phil to switch off the radio, and in the process disrupting an image that has become practically iconic over the preceding 90-odd minutes. Phil touches her arm, making sure she’s real. They are still in their clothes, and Rita will soon reprimand Phil for falling asleep the previous evening; their first full night together was a chaste one. ‘Something is different,’ he says. ‘Anything different is good.’ They kiss. He goes to the window and is ecstatic at the sight of the empty streets covered with crisp snow into which no one has yet stepped. He dives back into bed. ‘You know what today is?’ he asks. ‘Today is tomorrow.’ Then: ‘Is there anything I can do for you, today?’ The music swells. They kiss and embrace on the bed. The camera pans to the right, past the alarm clock, and over to the window. In the simple direction of the shot, moving from left to right, rather than the right-to-left action that characterised so many of Phil’s days, the dreadful motion of the time loop is at last inverted and corrected. Dissolve to an exterior shot of the bed-and-breakfast. It looks like it’s made of sugar; it belongs on top of a cake that might be presented at a retirement party. There’s a white archway at the bottom of the path, and a white picket fence running around the garden. When they have descended the front steps, Phil takes Rita in his arms and says: ‘Let’s live here.’ They kiss again. Celebratory brass kicks in on the soundtrack. And then, just when we thought that everything was perfect, and that the redemption was complete, Phil offers an amendment to his idealism that plunges the film through the fairy-tale trapdoor and back into the real world: ‘We’ll rent to start.’ Perhaps those viewers who interpret the ending of the film as unequivocally optimistic also misremember Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’ by recalling the sign-off (‘What will survive of us is love’) but not the preceding line (‘Our almost-instinct almost true:’).99

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Ramis came up with ‘Let’s live here.’ But ‘We’ll rent to start’ was Bill Murray’s suggestion. Can you say you’re surprised? That line is the fly in the ointment, the grain of sand that scratches your retina as you behold a magnificent sunset. It also allows a provocative and priceless note of uncertainty, one of many in the film, to infiltrate what could have been a straightforward happy-ever-after. At the very moment when Phil is capable of leaving the prison in which he has been caged for a small lifetime, he chooses to stay put. In narrative terms, this is justified by his transformation: he no longer sees the world in terms of confinement; now he knows he can do anything he wants, including nothing. But there is in the film’s ending another resonance with Beckett, who also wrote of two figures choosing to remain in the unchanging landscape that has tormented them. Like Phil and Rita, Vladimir and Estragon are going nowhere: VLADIMIR:

Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON:

Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.100

Rubin believes that Phil will be just fine. ‘He’s really centred now,’ he says. ‘I think a guy who is as old as he really is inside is not going to return to his old ways.’101 But I suspect the problem for Phil will be not recidivism but disappointment, failure, feelings of inadequacy. No day that he has now can ever match up to that last 2 February. He will never again experience that level of adoration, since for the townspeople of Punxsutawney any subsequent encounter with him cannot help but represent a falling-off. He can no longer devote all his energy to righting everyone else’s wrongs; he can no longer be Superman. And just look what happened to Clark Kent in Superman II (1981) once he had forsaken his powers. It was not a pretty sight. Richard Combs has wondered whether ‘in becoming all things to the town’s citizens, [Phil] doesn’t so much transform himself as disperse himself, becoming like the much-dispersed hero of Woody Allen’s Zelig’.102 Taken to its darkest extreme, the dissipation of identity inherent

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Rooms with a view

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in that forecast would result in Phil experiencing something like the hardships endured by Grace in Dogville (2003), Lars von Trier’s assault on the cosy small-town America celebrated in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both characters provide fulsome services to the apparently benevolent townsfolk among whom they are marooned. And there is some correlation between Grace’s odd-jobbing at the start of Dogville and Phil’s last 2 February in Punxsutawney, during which, like Grace, he divides his time according to the altruistic tasks that he must perform. Ramis and Rubin have hinted that the people of Punxsutawney are as flawed as anyone else – in the kidnap sequence, for instance, Buster orders the marksmen to aim high so that Phil will be shot without any corresponding injury to the rodent, while in earlier drafts the antipathy toward the groundhog from the townsfolk was so intense that the creature had to be protected by bullet-proof glass. It is more than just conjecture that Phil may one day grow permanently disillusioned with Punxsutawney, or it with him. Still, I wish Phil well. I hope he makes it. As Phil and Rita scamper into the deserted street, and the image dissolves to a shot of clouds drifting across a blue sky, Nat King Cole’s ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ is playing, sounding another subtle note of equivocation. Almost like being in love? It recalls Phil’s earlier comment to Rita, when he is attempting to charm her into his arms: ‘I’m just trying to talk like normal people talk. Isn’t this how they talk?’

Happily ever after?

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He’s trying to talk like normal people. They will rent to start. This is almost like being in love. Watch it with that commitment, Phil. You could put somebody’s eye out. For now, the audience surrenders to the song, enjoying the ironic understatement of its opening line: ‘What a day this has been …’ ‘Today is tomorrow’ Box-office figures can be easily tallied. Cultural impact takes rather longer to measure. Not so with Groundhog Day. The movie was a commercial hit, but it has also quickly emerged as one of the most broadly influential films in modern cinema. In December 2003, it was screened as part of a Museum of Modern Art season entitled ‘The Hidden God: Film and Faith’. Works by Rossellini and Bergman were also included, but it was Groundhog Day that was selected as the opening-night presentation; and the occasion provided an opportunity for religious groups to debate its pertinence to their individual faiths. The most vocal support came from Buddhists, but there were interpretations of the movie as intrinsically Jewish (‘The movie tells us, as Judaism does, that the work doesn’t end until the world has been perfected,’ argued Dr Niles Goldstein) and Christian (‘The groundhog is clearly the resurrected Christ,’ announced the critic Michael Bronski). It was revealed that the film has also been used in teachings by the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Dafa, sometimes known as Falun Gong. The New York Times noted that ‘Curators of the series, polling some 35 critics in the literary, religious and film worlds to suggest films with religious interpretations, found that Groundhog Day came up so many times that there was actually a squabble over who would write about it in the retrospective’s catalog.’103 In a list of all-time best comedies compiled in 2000 by the American Film Institute, Ramis’s film came in at number 34. In a 2002 poll of critics and film-makers in Sight and Sound, only one person cited Groundhog Day as a personal favourite. But that person was the writer, director and former Monty Python member Terry Jones; and he placed the film in the illustrious company of Duck Soup (1933) and Abel Gance’s Napoléon

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(1927), so it must be regarded as the mightiest of compliments.104 Members of London’s National Film Theatre demonstrated the widespread affection for the film by voting for it as part of a ‘Members’ Choice’ season in November 2001; the list also included a Scorsese, a Hitchcock and two Kubricks.105 Two years earlier, the Daily Express had picked Groundhog Day as part of its ‘Best Films of the Nineties’ roundup.106 In the years since the movie’s release, film-makers have experimented with repetitive structures in which the same scenes are played out more than once with a contrasting emphasis – Go (1999), Amores Perros (2000), Lawless Heart (2001), Elephant (2003)and Reconstruction (2003) dare the audience to look again at a scene it has already watched, and find within it fresh illumination; Flirt (1995) and the three parts of La Trilogie (2003) repeat or redefine their narratives in different locations or tones; Sliding Doors, Me Myself I (1999) and Passion of Mind (2000) incorporate a fractured parallel narrative into romantic drama; television series including The X-Files, Xena: Warrior Princess and Seven Days pay homage to Groundhog Day,107 as does the audio episode of Dr Who called ‘Flip-Flop’, in which the characters become stuck in a time loop on a planet called Punxsutawnee.108 The singer Craig David did his part by basing the video for his hit song ‘Seven Days’ on the movie. Elsewhere, the theme of moral improvement has been harnessed to a science-fiction premise in films that imitate Groundhog Day in all but its rejection of logic. Nicolas Cage glimpses how his life would have turned out if he had chosen love over money in The Family Man (2000). Mel Gibson plays a chauvinist who supernaturally develops a female perspective in What Women Want (2000). Jim Carrey continues to devote himself to seeking out a new Groundhog Day – surely a pursuit that qualifies as a Groundhog Day in itself – in his films Liar, Liar (1997), The Truman Show (1997) and Bruce Almighty (2003). But Carrey lacks Bill Murray’s top-to-toe, marrow-deep amorality. He’s too needy, whereas Murray doesn’t need anything. Not even sunlight. The film’s title has gradually been absorbed into common speech. A cursory search on a newspaper website produces more references to the

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film than Phil could have found time to read. It’s everywhere – in travel writing, rock journalism, advice columns, horoscopes. Tony Blair refers to it in a speech about the Northern Ireland peace process, and it crops up in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 2002. It makes it into the headline of a restaurant review (‘A culinary “groundhog day”’), a cricket report (‘Groundhog Day for West Indies’), and an editorial on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (‘No “smoking guns”, no huge breakthroughs, just a hint that Groundhog Day may be over’), while a kidnap victim uses the phrase to describe his captivity in the Colombian jungle.109 Either the film touched a nerve, or our vocabulary had not previously been equipped to articulate a commonly felt boredom and frustration. Interviewed by Larry King, Bill Murray emphasised the significance, for him, of Groundhog Day. ‘Probably the best work I’ve ever done,’ he declared. ‘And probably the best work that Harold will ever do.’110 Ouch. And so true. Ramis has gamely pursued the central motif of Groundhog Day – repeating the theme of repetition, if you like. He cast Michael Keaton as a man contending with his own clones in Multiplicity (1996); the presence of Andie MacDowell only increased the sense of familiarity. Ramis’s remake of Bedazzled (2000) also wrings humour from replaying before our eyes something we have already seen, serving up various interpretations of the seven wishes granted to the hero. But Ramis’s preoccupation with repetition manifested itself most grimly in Analyze That (2003), a sequel to Analyze This (1999) that blurs the line between follow-up and facsimile. Danny Rubin, whose only other filmed work since Groundhog Day is, at the time of writing, the satirical thriller S.F.W. (1994), has in his unproduced screenplays also persisted in playing temporal games. His script Martian Time, for instance, concerns an alien whose apparently miraculous feats on earth are only made possible by its ability to manipulate time. The brilliance of Groundhog Day is not diminished by the fact that its makers have yet to surpass it; if it was the only thing Ramis, Rubin and Murray had ever done, they could die happy. Gilbert Adair cited the film

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as the progenitor of ‘avant-garde lite’, a sub-genre that he argued would also include Being John Malkovich (1999) and The Truman Show111. The word ‘lite’ has derogatory connotations, but it is precisely this apparent ‘lite-ness’ that makes the movie’s handling of philosophical issues so impressive. The narrative might take the form of a computer game, in which the quest begins from scratch each time the hero fails, but in its nature it couldn’t be further from that medium. Hollywood routinely manufactures entertainments that offer audiences the same pleasures available from a PlayStation. Groundhog Day is, in both intent and appeal, richer than that. It is stimulating enough to be worthy of moral debate, but

Before and after

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never so highfalutin that it neglects its responsibility as entertainment. Other ‘lite’ and not-so-‘lite’ works would do well to match its versatility. The movie also represents an unpolluted instance of pure cinema. That term is traditionally applied to a picture that boasts eye-popping effects or humbling landscapes. There’s none of that here. The irony of John Bailey’s cinematography is that it fully achieves its ambition for each shot to register merely as another flat moment in the same unremarkable day. But Groundhog Day could not be rendered in any other medium. Ramis and Rubin tell their story with the camera: all the necessary information is contained in the movement or duration of a shot; in how it is juxtaposed with its neighbouring images, in its relationship to shots we have already seen or are about to see. It’s a film that teaches us how to watch films. The commonplace presence on DVDs of deleted scenes, different angles and directors’ cuts has surreptitiously discredited the notion that there can be a single definitive version of a movie. But film was malleable long before video and DVD: every flashback, freeze-frame and jump-cut, each instance of slow-motion or split-screen, attest to this. These devices license the film-maker to thumb a nose at mortality by manipulating screen time, and delaying the inevitable end, in a way that can never be possible with real time. Groundhog Day, like the best work of Alain Resnais or Nicolas Roeg, is a masterclass in these possibilities. In its basic form it already incorporates a wealth of ‘extra scenes’, ‘different angles’ and tragic or humorous alternate endings, while each sequence within the time loop is like an inbuilt remake of, or sequel to, the one that precedes it. All bases are covered. Perhaps it is for this reason that the film, with its inherent repetitions, seems to grow with each viewing, yielding fresh meanings and questions that sprout off from it like new shoots. The experience of returning repeatedly to Groundhog Day proves finally to be no kind of Groundhog Day at all.

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Notes 1 Nick Hornby, About a Boy (London: Indigo, 1998), pp. 75–6. 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (London: Vintage, 1955), p. 47. 3 From Danny Rubin’s revision of his original script, dated 2 February 1991, published in Scenario vol. 1 no. 2, Spring 1995, p. 24. 4 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 6 May 1993, p. 32. 5 Geoff Andrew, Time Out, 5–12 May 1993, p. 60. 6 Quentin Curtis, Independent on Sunday, 9 May 1993, Review section, p. 19. 7 From Baby Boom production notes, Columbia Pictures, 1987. 8 Anthony Lane, Independent on Sunday, 2 May 1993, Review section, p. 23. 9 Richard Natale, Variety, 8 February 1993, p. 73. 10 Harold Ramis, Premiere vol. 6 no. 6, February 1993, pp. 68–9. 11 Anne Billson, Sunday Telegraph, 9 May 1993, Review section, p. 6. 12 Natale, Variety, p. 73. 13 Jonathan Romney, New Statesman, 7 May 1993, reprinted in Short Orders (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), p. 49. 14 Hornby, About a Boy, p. 75. 15 Author interview with Danny Rubin, 16 September 2003. 16 Information taken from two emails from Richard A. Lupoff to the author dated 12 August and 4 October 2003. The short story ‘12:01PM’ was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1973, and can be found in Lupoff’s collection Before … 12:01 … and After (Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan and Bremer, 1996). 17 See Leon Arden, ‘Rights in Ideas’, The Author, Summer 2001, pp. 65–6. The Detroit

News, in its issue of 12 December 1995, reports that One Fine Day is a significantly darker text, featuring ‘witchcraft, an encounter with God … an aeroplane explosion that kills 192 people, a rape, and a woman’s suicide’. 18 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 19 From The Weight of Time documentary featured on the Groundhog Day Collector’s Edition DVD (Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment). 20 Rubin, Scenario, p. 51. 21 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 22 The Weight of Time. 23 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 24 Rubin, Scenario, p. 184. 25 Ibid., p. 52. 26 Ibid., p. 185. 27 Director’s commentary, Groundhog Day Collector’s Edition DVD. 28 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 29 The Weight of Time. 30 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 31 Email from Danny Rubin to the author dated 17 September 2003. 32 This is taken from the draft labelled: ‘Groundhog Day by Danny Rubin. Second revision by Harold Ramis. January 7 1992’, p. 2. 33 Ibid. 34 For example, Rita’s endorsement of the joys of Groundhog Day (‘He comes out, he looks around, he wrinkles up his little nose …’) and Larry on covering ‘the swallows returning to Capistrano for ten years in a row’, both in second revision, p. 4. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 9. 37 All dialogue quoted is transcribed from the Groundhog Day Collector’s Edition DVD. 38 Second revision, p. 23.

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39 From author interview, and email from Danny Rubin to author dated 1 October 2003. See Scenario, p. 53 for a different account that has the studio head saying: ‘You don’t need this curse thing, do you?’. 40 Rubin, Scenario, p. 14. 41 Second revision, p. 6. 42 Ibid., p. 24. 43 Ibid., p. 56. 44 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 45 Ibid. 46 Second revision, p. 43. 47 Ibid., p. 44. 48 Ibid., p. 117. 49 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 50 Second revision, pp. 120–1. 51 Ibid., p. 8. 52 Ibid., p. 59. 53 Ibid., p. 60. 54 Ibid., p. 59. 55 Ibid., p. 75. See also Rubin, Scenario, p. 24. 56 Second revision, p. 17. 57 Rubin, Scenario, p. 185. 58 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 59 Ibid. 60 Bill Murray came up with the idea of a montage of calendar pages being peeled, with each page of the calendar dated 2 February; this was shot but eventually cut when no suitable place could be found for it. 61 From interview with Danny Rubin at punxsutawneyphil.com. 62 Director’s commentary. 63 Ramis, Premiere, p. 68–9. 64 Ibid. 65 Adam Mars-Jones, Independent, 7 May 1993, second section, p. 16. 66 È già ieri, directed by Giulio Manfredonia, opened in Italy on 16 January 2004. 67 See punxsutawneyphil.com.

68 Email from Danny Rubin to author, 17 September 2003. 69 The Weight of Time. 70 Director’s commentary. 71 Second revision, p. 15. 72 A big improvement on Mrs Lancaster’s line in the second revision, p. 28: ‘Is that the Italian dessert with the brandy and the chocolate mousse?’ Phil: ‘No, that’s spaghetti. Never mind.’ 73 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 32. 74 All timings are taken from the Groundhog Day Collector’s Edition DVD, which runs for 97 minutes. 75 Suzanne M. Daughton, ‘The Spiritual Power of Repetitive Form: Steps Toward Transcendence in Groundhog Day’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication vol. 13 no. 2, June 1996, p. 146. 76 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death: The Final Stage of Growth (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 10. 77 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 78 Independent, 30 April 1993, second section, p. 19. 79 Ibid. 80 Second revision, p. 4. 81 Rubin, Scenario, p. 184. 82 Nicholson Baker, The Fermata (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 179. 83 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 84 Sight and Sound vol. 7 no. 2 (NS), February 1997, p. 20. 85 Baker, The Fermata, p. 188. 86 Most notably Jude Davies, ‘Gender, Ethnicity and Cultural Crisis’, Screen vol. 36 no. 3, Autumn 1995, pp. 214–32. 87 ‘I had a book of Jacques Brel poetry and lyrics,’ says Danny Rubin, ‘and remembered that stanza when I wanted [Phil] to say

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something romantic in French. If I had found any appropriate Baudelaire I probably would have used it since Phil refers to that at some point.’ From email to author, 2 October 2003. 88 Rubin, Scenario, p. 184. 89 Ibid., p. 28. 90 Ibid., p. 53. 91 The second revision (p. 83) included still more suicides, including a scene in which Ned Ryerson is in his office with a client when a body falls past the window. Ned sees Phil in the street below ‘sprawled there like a broken puppet, lifeless’. 92 Second revision, p. 86. See also Rubin, Scenario, p. 33. 93 Previously featured in another ‘time loop’ movie, the ethereal Somewhere in Time (1980). 94 Rubin, Scenario, p. 41. 95 Ibid., p. 185. 96 Ibid., p. 32. 97 Ibid., p. 41. 98 Ibid., p. 43. 99 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 110–11. 100 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 94. 101 Author interview, 16 September 2003. 102 Richard Combs, Guardian, 27 May 1993, second section, p. 5. 103 Alex Kuczynski, New York Times, 7 December 2003. 104 Sight and Sound vol. 12 no. 9 (NS), September 2002, p. 44. See also Terry Jones, Guardian, 25 October 1996, second section, p. 7: ‘I really wish I’d made Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day … For me it’s a brilliant example of fantasy set in a real world.’

105 The full season, screened at the National Film Theatre during November 2001, consisted of: Barry Lyndon, Burnt by the Sun, Un Carnet de bal, Chance or Coincidence, Dial M for Murder, Great Expectations, Groundhog Day, Lagaan, Local Hero, Mean Streets, Topsy-Turvy and 2001: A Space Odyssey. 106 The full list, published 31 December 1999, consisted of: Les Amants du PontNeuf, La Belle Noiseuse, The Blue Kite, Groundhog Day, Hoop Dreams, The Kingdom, London, Reservoir Dogs, Safe, Six Degrees of Separation, The Thin Red Line, Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Toy Story, Vanya on 42nd Street. The validity and significance of the list should in no way be diminished by the fact that it was compiled solely by this writer. 107 The X-Files: ‘Monday’ from the sixth season; Xena: Warrior Princess: ‘Been There, Done That’ from the third season; Seven Days: ‘Come Again’, episode three. Star Trek: The Next Generation also employed a loop structure in an episode (‘Cause and Effect’ from the fifth season) screened ten months before Groundhog Day opened. What goes around comes around. 108 Doctor Who: Flip Flop, BBC/Big Finish Productions 2003, BFPDWCD7EB. 109 All quotes and examples from various articles found on the Independent website (www.independent.co.uk). 110 As quoted by Harold Ramis, director’s commentary. 111 Gilbert Adair, Independent on Sunday, 19 March 2000, Review section, p. 3.

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Credits Groundhog Day USA 1993 Directed by Harold Ramis Produced by Trevor Albert Harold Ramis Screenplay by Danny Rubin Harold Ramis Story by Danny Rubin Director of Photography John Bailey Edited by Pembroke J. Herring Production Designer David Nichols Music by George Fenton ©1993 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.

Production Companies Columbia Pictures present a Trevor Albert production a Harold Ramis film Executive Producer C. O. Erickson Associate Producer Whitney White Production Accountant Margaret A. Mitchell Production Co-ordinator Alecia LaRue Unit Production Manager C. O. Erickson Location Manager Bob Hudgins 2nd Unit Location Manager Ritchie Copenhaver Assistant Location Manager Kimberly K. Miller Production Secretary Margaret J. Orlando Assistant to Mr Ramis Suzanne Herrington Assistant to Mr Albert Dawn Erickson Key Set Production Assistant James Richard Weis Set Production Assistants Christina J. Stauffer Brian M. Schwartz Valerie Flueger Production Office Assistants Judd Nissen Jennifer Bird

2nd Unit Director Steve Boyum 1st Assistant Director Michael Haley 2nd Assistant Director John L. Roman 2nd 2nd Assistant Directors Sam Hoffman Cyd Adams 2nd Unit 1st Assistant Directors J. Alan Hopkins Gaetano ‘Tom’ Lisi 2nd Unit 2nd Assistant Director Brian W. Boyd Script Supervisor Judi Townsend 2nd Unit Script Supervisors Mary Carlson Julie Chandler Casting by Howard Feuer Casting Assistant Nicole Arbusto Extras Casting Holzer, Roche & Ridge Casting, Inc. Chicago Casting Jane Brody 2nd Unit Directors of Photography James Blanford George Kohut Camera Operator Michael Stone

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2nd Unit Camera Operators Michael Kohnhorst Ann Lukacs 1st Assistant Camera Peter Kuttner 2nd Assistant Camera Beth Cotter Loader Linda Gacsko Key Grip Morgan Michael Lewis 2nd Unit Key Grip Dennis de la Mata Best Boy Grip Mark E. Matthys Dolly Grip Bradley T. Matthys Chief Lighting Technician Mike G. Moyer 2nd Unit Chief Lighting Technician Tom Lewis Assistant Chief Lighting Technician Mark R. Lindberg Stills Photography Louis Goldman Special Effects Tom Ryba Additional Editing Craig Herring 1st Assistant Editors Lin Coleman Tony Ciccone 2nd Assistant Editor Sandra French Apprentice Editors Jim Durante Kimberly Lord Art Director Peter Lansdown Smith

Assistant Art Directors Gary Baugh James J. Murakami Art Department Coordinator Amy Berk Leadman Joel Prihoda Set Designer Karen Fletcher-Trujillo Set Decorator Lisa Fischer Property Master Amie Frances McCarthy Assistant Property Master Ron Bolanowski Construction Coordinator Phil Read Costume Designer Jennifer Butler Costume Supervisor Mike Butler Costumers Julie Lynn Glick Patrick Caulfield Key Make-up Dorothy Pearl Make-up Deborah K. Dee Special Prosthetic Makeup Art Anthony Key Hairstylist Emanuel ‘Manny’ Millar Hairstylist Gunnar Swanson Title Design Pittard/Sullivan/Fitzgerald Opticals by Cinema Research Corporation

Orchestrations Jeff Atmajian Music Supervisor Sharon Boyle Music Editor Sally Boldt Scoring Mixer John Richards Soundtrack ‘Weatherman’ by George Fenton, Harold Ramis, performed by Delbert McClinton; produced by George Fenton (Courtesy of Curb Records); ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny Bono, performed by Sonny & Cher (Courtesy of ATCO Records. By arrangement with Warner Special Products); ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ by Lester Lee, Zeke Manners, performed by Frankie Yankovic (Courtesy of Columbia Records. By arrangement with Sony Music Licensing); ‘Take Me Round Again’ by George Fenton, performed by Susie Stevens; ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Eddy Arnold, Cindy Walker, performed by Ray Charles (Courtesy of Ray Charles Enterprises); ‘Eighteenth Variation from Rapsodie on a Theme of Paganini’ by Sergei Rachmaninoff; ‘Phil’s Piano Solo’ written, performed and produced by Terry Fryer; ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ by Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, performed

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by Nat King Cole (Courtesy of Capitol Records. By arrangement with CEMA Special Markets); the musical composition: ‘La Bourrée du célibataire’ by Jacques Brel (©MCA/Caravelle Music France – Tropicales Catalogue) Soundtrack Available on Epic Soundtrax Poem ‘Trees’ by Joyce Kilmer (Used by permission of Vogel Music Co. Inc.) Production Mixer Les Lazarowitz Boom Operator Jeff Williams Sound Cable Scott R. Thomson Re-recording Mixers Sergio Reyes B. Tennyson Sebastian II Bill W. Benton Supervising Sound Editor George H. Anderson Sound Editors Kevin Barlia Ed Callahan David Giammarco John A. Larsen Cindy Marty Assistant Sound Editors Linda Martin Ann Ducommun Negative Cutter Donah Bassett & Associates ADR Editor Mary Andrews

Sound Services by Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City, California Transportation Captain George J. DiLeonardi Transportation Cocaptain Dan Maxwell Craft Service Susan B. Mencke Catering Tomkats Catering Stunt Co-ordinator Rick LeFevour Stunts Stacy Logan Maryann Kelman Steve Boyum James R. Mammoser Frank P. Calzavara Jim McCarthy Rudy Calzavara Linda Perlin Ed Fernandez Randy Popplewell James Fierro Gina Reale Glory Fioramonti Rich Wilkie Mark Harper Jeffrey Martin Williams Animal Trainers/Handlers Bill Hoffman Kim Miller 2nd Unit Helicopter Pilot Craig Hosking Unit Publicists Nancy Willen Rafe Blasi Special Thanks to The members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club and the citizens of

Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania The community leaders and citizens of Woodstock, Illinois Illinois Film Office Tape Material from Jeopardy! (Courtesy of Jeopardy Productions, Inc. Cast Bill Murray Phil Connors Andie MacDowell Rita Hanson Chris Elliott Larry Stephen Tobolowsky Ned Ryerson Brian Doyle-Murray Buster Green Marita Geraghty Nancy Taylor Angela Paton Mrs Lancaster Rick Ducommun Gus Rick Overton Ralph Robin Duke Doris, the waitress Carol Bivins anchorwoman Willie Garson Kenny, Phil’s assistant Ken Hudson Campbell man in hallway Les Podewell old man Rod Sell Groundhog official Tom Milanovich state trooper

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John Watson Sr bartender Peggy Roeder piano teacher Harold Ramis neurologist David Pasquesi psychiatrist Lee R. Sellars cop Chet Dubowski Felix, bank guard Doc Erickson Herman, bank guard Sandy Maschmeyer Phil’s movie date Leighanne O’Neil fan on street Evangeline Binkley Samuel Mages Ben Zwick Jeopardy! viewers Hynden Walsh Debbie Kleiser Michael Shannon Fred Kleiser Timothy Hendrickson Bill, waiter Martha Webster Alice, waitress Angela Gollan piano student Shaun Chaiyabhat boy in tree

Dianne B. Shaw ER nurse Barbara Ann Grimes Ann Heekin Lucina Paquet flat tyre ladies Brenda Pickleman Buster’s wife Amy Murdoch Buster’s daughter Eric Saiet Buster’s son Lindsay Reinsch woman with cigarette Roger Adler guitar player Ben A. Fish bass player Don ‘Rio’ McNichols drums player Brian Willig saxophone player Richard Henzel Rob Riley DJ voices Terry Fryer piano hand double Jim Kindelon Bill Murray stand-in Scooter the groundhog [uncredited] Bill Hoffman Paul Terrien Groundhog Day officials

Reni Santoni dubbed voice of state trooper Cathy Kellogg nurse on phone Douglas Blakeslee man with snow shovel Leslie Frates Jeopardy! contestant Mason Gamble Grady Hutt boys Simon Harvey news reporter Regina Prokop polka dancer 9,085 feet 100 minutes 57 seconds Dolby In Colour Prints by Technicolor 2.35:1 [Panavision] MPAA: 31714 DVD available from Columbia Tristar Home Video (1999) Credits compiled by Markku Salmi

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Also Published Amores Perros Paul Julian Smith (2003)

Eyes Wide Shut Michel Chion (2002)

Thelma & Louise Marita Sturken (2000)

L’Argent Kent Jones (1999)

Heat Nick James (2002)

The Thing Anne Billson (1997)

Blade Runner Scott Bukatman (1997)

The Idiots John Rockwell (2003)

The ‘Three Colours’ Trilogy Geoff Andrew (1998)

Blue Velvet Michael Atkinson (1997)

Independence Day Michael Rogin (1998)

Caravaggio Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit (1999)

Jaws Antonia Quirke (2002)

A City of Sadness Bérénice Reynaud (2002) Crash Iain Sinclair (1999) The Crying Game Jane Giles (1997) Dead Man Jonathan Rosenbaum (2000) Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge Anupama Chopra (2002) Don’t Look Now Mark Sanderson (1996) Do the Right Thing Ed Guerrero (2001) Easy Rider Lee Hill (1996) The Exorcist Mark Kermode (1997, 2nd edn 1998, rev. 2nd edn 2003)

L.A. Confidential Manohla Dargis (2003) Last Tango in Paris David Thompson (1998) Once Upon a Time in America Adrian Martin (1998) Pulp Fiction Dana Polan (2000) The Right Stuff Tom Charity (1997) Saló or The 120 Days of Sodom Gary Indiana (2000) Seven Richard Dyer (1999) The Shawshank Redemption Mark Kermode (2003) The Silence of the Lambs Yvonne Tasker (2002) The Terminator Sean French (1996)

Titanic David M. Lubin (1999) Trainspotting Murray Smith (2002) The Usual Suspects Ernest Larsen (2002) The Wings of the Dove Robin Wood (1999) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Peter William Evans (1996) WR – Mysteries of the Organism Raymond Durgnat (1999)