The Great Movies III

At 6 a.m. on February 2, Phil is awakened by the clock alarm in his cozy little Punxsutawney bed-and-breakfast. It is playing "I Got You Babe," by Sonny and Cher. He goes through a series of experiences: being greeted by an old classmate who wants to sell him insurance, stepping into an icy puddle, performing a stand-up on camera in front of the wretched groundhog, which he considers, not without reason, to be ratlike. Phil is rude to Rita and Larry, and insulting to his viewers (by implying they are idiots to be watching the segment). He has no liking for himself, his job, his colleagues, or the human race.

All he wants to do is get out of town. He begins to. He doesn't quite make it. What with one thing and another, he wakes up the next morning in the same bed, with the radio playing the same song, and it gradually becomes clear to him that he is reliving precisely the same day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, in his case, doesn't creep in at its petty pace from day to day, but gets stuck like a broken record. After the third or fourth day, the enormity of his predicament is forced upon him. He is free to change what he says and does from one February 2 to the next, but it will always be February 2 for everyone else in the world, and he will always start from the same place.' They will repeat themselves unless he changes the script, but tomorrow they will have forgotten their new lines and be back to the first draft of February 2.

One night in a bowling alley, sitting at the bar, he says almost to himself: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and everything that you did was the same, and nothing mattered?"The sad sack next to him at the bar overhears him and answers: "That about sums it up for me."

Slowly, inexpertly, Phil begins to learn from his trial runs through February 2. Ramis and Rubin in an early draft had him living through ten thousand cycles, and Ramis calculates that in the current version he goes through about forty. During that time, Phil learns to really see himself for the first time, and to see Rita, and to learn that he loves her, and to strive to deserve her love. He astonishingly wants to become a good man.

His journey has become a parable for our materialistic age; it embodies a view of human growth that, at its heart, reflects the same spiritual view of existence Murray explored in his very personal project The Razor's Edge. He is bound to the wheel of time, and destined to revolve until he earns his promotion to the next level. A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says Groundhog Day is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer, but never mind: they have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."

What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair.

We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always February 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel."The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.

There are two conversations in Howards End (1992) between Henry Wilcox, a wealthy businessman, and Margaret Schlegel, who becomes his second wife. The first is amusing, the second desperate, and they express the film's buried subject, which is the impossibility of two people with fundamentally different values ever being able to really communicate. Around these conversations revolves a story involving those dependable standbys of circa 1900 British literature: class, wealth, family, hypocrisy, and real estate.

The movie stands with The Remains of the Day (1993), ,4 Room with a View (1985), and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998) among the best work by the team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, who between 1961 and Merchant's death in May 2005 made a series of films that could be described as "MerchantIvory" and everyone would know what you meant.