A Film Canon

Groundhog Day turns on a comic premise so simple and elegant that it doesn't need any narrative explanation or justification. When misanthropic weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) travels with new producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) to Punxsatawney, for the annual Groundhog Day celebrations, he finds himself condemned to live the same day over and over again, for a period that could be anything from ten to a thousand years. Most immediately, this allows for a comic dismantling of small-town nostalgia, as Phil's first use of his dilemma is to explore every niche that Punxsatawney offers for his debauchery, as well as relegate it to a simulation, or at least a spectacle, for his own personal amusement, part of which involves gathering information about its residents and then implanting false, nostalgic memories next time around. By the time the second acts starts, however, Phil has realized that, for all its charming technological backwardness, the most compelling thing about the town is his producer, an embodiment - albeit an endearing embodiment - of cutting-edge urban media. At the same time, he's sufficiently frustrated with his situation to embark upon a series of suicide attempts, experimenting with being "stabbed, shot, poisoned, hung, electrocuted, frozen, torched and burned" as an apotheosis of his insatiable sensory appetite. Although he continues to wake up on the same day, these attempts take him to a place somewhere beyond jouissance - "I've come to the end of me...a long, lustrous winter" - and it's here that the film really comes into its own. Whereas a more conventional comedy might choose to understand this moment as conversion, Ramis never quite presents Phil's transformation as anything more than an exhausation of libidinal and antisocial urges; or, alternatively, as a recognition that doing good is simply the only way to maintain desire in a world without consequences, or the possibility of death. It's this unsentimental utilitarianism that offsets any preachiness the film might have had, and contributes to the laconic, mildly ironic nature of Phil's altruism - his change never feels absolutely categorical, or at least never quite effaces his edgy, acerbic charisma. It's a testament to comedy's ability to speak to the full profundity of human experience and emotion, and a kind of relocation of a more typically 80s nostalgia-mode to the camera apparatus itself, as Ramis' taste for repetition-with-a-difference produces a physical comedy that seems less a function of diegetic time or space than of editing. In particular, his tendency to repeat certain segments over and over again, as well as to dramatically alter the pacing at critical moments, produces an loving, intimate proximity to the filming and editing process. At times, it's a similar aesthetic and comic experience to watching for bloopers, awaiting that human contingency that melts the camera's ice-sculpted austerity, and glimpsing a nascent prospect of intimately portable, digital, and televisual technologies.