REVIEW:
This nineties gem was the first of its kind. By that I mean it was the first movie to have this idea about reliving the same day again and again, which has since then been done in countless movies from Edge of Tomorrow to Happy Death Day to Boss Level. But Groundhog Day wasn’t just the first, it was also the most creative, in the way it used the idea to explore a romantic comedy through every avenue of pursuit possible.
You see, Groundhog Day doesn’t start out as a romantic comedy. The characters don’t start out hating each other, or flirting with each other, or doing anything that would lead you to think there will be a romance. Instead, this begins as more of a Scrooge story (another movie starring Murray,) with Phil Connors (Murray,) laughing at, looking down upon, and ridiculing everyone, including the groundhog.
But then something happens. Weatherman Connors, wakes up on the second day at the Bed and Breakfast where he’s staying in this small town Punxitony, and he’s reliving the first day all over again. He goes through the day in disbelief, making slight changes to what he did the day before, experiencing everything with curiosity and uncertainty. Connors is just trying to get through the day, as if whatever he experienced yesterday might have all been just a dream.
And then it happens again. A third time. And this time Connors knows it’s for real. This time he needs to come up with a plan, to act on this, instead of just getting through it, waiting for the day to be done. Because it’s not going to be done. Ever. Apparently. For this third night, and the first one where it has finally hit him that this is for real, he goes to a bar, gets drunk with some locals, drives on the train tracks with them, partakes in a car chase with the police, and gets arrested. And boy is Connors happy when he wakes up in his bed again, the next morning, as opposed to in a jail cell.
That marks the end of act 2. Act one was before the situation, including all of day 1. Act 2 is the situation itself, the inciting incident, ending with Connors’ first reaction once he realizes this is actually happening… depression. So if act 1 is day 1… the before, then act 2 is day 2 and 3. After that, we stop counting days.
For the third and fourth acts, Phil embraces what is happening to him. First it’s with a woman named Nancy, in act 3. Nancy is a total stranger who Phil just walks by, after doing his Groundhog Day report once again, and thinks is hot. There was something that happened in act 2, which gave Phil this idea for act 3. He was sitting at the bar with those two guys, who he would later drive onto the train tracks, and Phil talked about a day he once had where he and a woman made love “like sea otters.” Why couldn’t I have that day to relive again and again, he asks. And so that’s what he does in act 3.
Phil passes by Nancy, stops her, and asks her some random questions. He then uses her answers the next day to pretend that he and Nancy once knew each other. All of this culminates with he and Nancy spending an intimate evening together. But there’s something else that comes out of it too. When he’s making out with Nancy, Phil says the name Rita. Twice. This is our first indication that Phil has a thing for Rita. Our first clue. The first sign that this might be a romantic comedy. And it propels us into the next act, which is all about Rita.
And now we are in act 4. This starts the second half of the movie. The Rita story. The romantic comedy movie. If the first half was a take on A Christmas Carol, minus the ghosts, then the second half is the redemption and the romance. In act 4, Connors directly pursues Rita head on. What that means is he slowly and carefully starts to learn every detail about her, from her studying French poetry in college to what drink she likes to get and what she likes to toast to. And he uses this to make her fall more and more in love with him. Or so he thinks.
Now we’ve seen the movie where a guy has a secret that he is using to win over a girl, without her knowing about it before. It goes all the way back to Shakespeare, with Much Ado About Nothing. And the girl always finds out the secret at the end, and then splits with the guy until they get beck together for the inevitable finalie. This movie is not that. It doesn’t follow the usual romantic comedy beats in any way. Connors has a secret that he uses to win over Rita, and the whole thing from start to finish, is handled in one act. By the end of act 4, Rita has rejected Connors over and over again, thinking that he’s a creep who called up all her friends to find out what she likes. How else could he possibly know so much about her?
And now we are in the fifth act of the movie. It took us a while to even get to Rita, and now Connors has gotten to her, learned everything about her, and still failed. He’s ready to give up. Literally. He spends the fifth act in his worst depression yet. If you think driving on the train tracks was bad, in this act he actually kill’s himself, over and over again. From a toaster oven in the shower, to jumping off the ledge of a building, to walking out into the street in front of a moving truck to driving down a cliff with the groundhog in his lap, he does it all. And none of it works. So essentially Connors has failed at this too. He has failed at failing. He still wakes up in the same bed the next morning, listening to the same song.
And so he decides to try a different approach. The approach is to just be a nice person and help people out. Only he doesn’t get there so fast. He begins the act, (act 6, the final act of the movie,) by telling Rita he’s a god. He explains everything, and how he knows everything that’s going to happen, and proves it, all while at the diner. Rita decides to spend the day with him to witness everything. And it’s a great day. But of course, by the end, she’s gone.
And that leads him into his god-like act of doing good. He tries to save the old man on the street from dying. He learns piano (granted he kicks out a child student from her lesson, which is not so benevolent, but we’ll look past that.) he saves a kid from falling out of a tree. He shows up with a spare tire and jack and changes the tire of a car with three elderly women in it. He convinces a girl named Debbie to stop having second thoughts about getting married. He uses the Heimlich maneuver to save Buster, the groundhog master, from choking on some food at a restaurant.
And all of this culminates with a big groundhog dance and auction party, where everyone he has come across approaches Phil and Rita to thank him for what he did that day. It’s kind of an It’s Wonderful Life moment, where everyone we have come across during the course of the film shows up at once to approach the protagonist, one after the next. And it works. Phil has officially become a good guy. He’s become a selfless hero who is saving others.
Perhaps the only thing missing is him doing a final weather report in which he talks about how meaningful Groundhog Day is because he can see that it means so much to these people. That may have been a nice way to contradict his first report, where he thought the whole thing was pointless. But it also may have been a little too much and too obvious. What we actually get in this movie is just right. Just the right amount of hence from Connors, without going over the top.