The Great Movies III

And now a memory. In 1972, the Venice Film Festival staged a retrospective of Chaplin's complete work, with prints from his own collection. On the closing night, his masterpiece, City Lights (1932), was shown outdoors in Piazza San Marco.' he lights were off, the orchestras were silenced for the first time in more than a century, and the film played on a giant screen to standing room only.

When it was over, and the blind flower girl could see again, and she realized the Little Tramp was her savior, there was much snuffling and blowing of noses. Then a single spotlight sprung from the darkness and illuminated a balcony overlooking the square. A little man stepped out and waved. And we cheered and cheered.

roundhog Day is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.

Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase "This is like Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.

The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.

This man is named Phil, and he is a weatherman. In a sense, he feels himself condemned to repeating the same day, anyway; the weather changes, but his on-camera shtick remains the same, and he is distant and ironic about his job. Every year on February 2 he is dispatched to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the festivities of Groundhog Day, on which Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, is awakened from his slumbers and studied to discover if he will see his shadow If he does, we will have another six weeks of winter. We usually have another six weeks of winter anyway, a fact along with many others that does not escape Phil as he signals his cynicism about this transcendentally silly event.

Phil is played by Bill Murray, and Murray is indispensable; before he makes the film wonderful, he does a more difficult thing, which is to make it bearable. I can imagine a long list of actors, whose names I will charitably suppress, who could appear in this material and render it simpering, or inane. The screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis is inspired, but inspired crucially because they saw Bill Murray in it. They understood how he would be able to transform it into something sublime, while another actor might reduce it to a cloying parable. Ramis and Murray had worked together from the dawn of their careers, at Second City in Chicago, and knew each other in the ways only improvisational actors can know each other, finding their limits and strengths in nightly risks before a volatile and boozy audience. I doubt if Ramis would have had the slightest interest in directing this material with anyone else but Murray. It wasn't the story that appealed to him, but the thought of Murray in it.

The Murray persona has become familiar without becoming tiring: the world is too much with him, he is a little smarter than everyone else, he has a detached melancholy, he is deeply suspicious of joy, he sees sincerity as a weapon that can be used against him, and yet he conceals emotional needs. He is Hamlet in a sitcom world. Lost in Translation, another film that works because Bill Murray is in it, captures these qualities. So does The LifeAquatic with Steve Zissou, which doesn't work because Murray's character has nothing to push against in a world that is as detached as he is.

In Groundhog Day (1993), notice how easily he reveals that Phil (the weatherman, not the groundhog) is a perfect bastard. He doesn't raise his voice or signal through energetic acting that he's an insufferable jerk. He just is. He draws for his Punxsutawney assignment a patient angel of a producer named Rita (Andie MacDowell) and a good sport of a cameraman named Larry (Chris Elliott). Like television production people everywhere, they're accustomed to "talent" that treats them shabbily; they indulge the egos of the on-camera performers and get on with their jobs, reflecting perhaps that they can do without the big bucks if it means being a creep like Phil.