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.
Groundhog Day is the masterpiece that slips you by.
Everybody knows The Godfather is the cinematic version of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Bertolucci is the directorial Beethoven. Fellini, Kubrick, Antonioni are Picasso, Wagner, and Caravaggio respectively. But Harold Ramis? Bill Murray? Andie MacDowell? A light-hearted romantic comedy about a bitter weatherman reliving the same day over and over to the soundtrack of Sonny & Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’? Surely, I’m not serious when I claim this 1993 film from the collaboration that brought us Caddyshack and Ghostbusters as the most astonishingly spiritual, life-affirming, poignant and provocative piece of storytelling genius ever committed to celluloid?
I am serious. And endeavouring to discuss a film that I have rewatched perhaps thirty times, each time finding something new and relevant to where I’m stationed in life, each time laughing and crying as though it were the first time, is no easy feat for me. I cannot convey the catharsis Pete Postlethwaite’s King Lear produced in me. Nor can I convey just how the angels sung and heaven’s light hit me when grade-twelve Kobe beef first fell apart in my mouth. And I cannot convey just how special Groundhog Day is to me. But I’ll try.
“Watch out for that first step,” Ned Ryerson, Needlenose Ned, Ned the Head says. “It’s a doozy.” And it certainly is a doozy. Not just the first step. But the second. And many steps after. Phil plunges into a pothole filled with icy water. He eventually learns, finally sidesteps the puddle, but not without getting his leg wet a few times. And that’s part of what Groundhog Day is all about. We’re watching a man take his first steps. We watch him take strides to becoming a fully integrated human, to seizing the day as Dead Poets Society’s Mr Keating might implore.
Don’t even get me started on the god and rat-worship discussion.
Because we are all living the same day over and over again. There’s variance here and there, but each day is a chance, a blank slate, from which to work. The macro’s in the minutiae. Every day we have the same conversations with loved ones. Every day we make dinner, go to work, exercise, read. Or perhaps we don’t. Perhaps we argue with our loved ones about everything. Perhaps we have the same argument we’ve had for years, just dressed up a little different. We might waste money on takeout, call in sick to work, skip the gym, and vegetate in front of bland ad-heavy television. We all have the same day. Taken to its extreme, and exploited fully, one person’s day looks like piano practice, poetry composition, ice-sculpting, or charity work, whilst another person’s day looks like stepping in front of a truck, bringing a toaster into the bath, or somersaulting off a clocktower.
We know Phil is trapped in the same day over and over, but so are we. But we have the power turn our trap into a gift, convert the curse to blessing, swap hell for heaven. Sisyphus was damned to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity. And so are we. Unless we learn to push that boulder in the best way possible, help others along the way, and pause on the mountainside to view the beautiful landscape below.
Groundhog Day, though simple and light-hearted on the surface, is riven with philosophical insight. Phil is not only wrestling with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, he’s also playing out the Jungian concept of the shadow. It’s no coincidence that the groundhog’s called Phil too. Every day, the question is: Will Phil see his shadow? “Look out for your shadow there, buddy,” a diner patron jokes when learning Phil has the same name as the groundhog. But, as Wittgenstein remarked, a serious philosophical work could be written entirely in jokes. Phil does need to look out for his shadow. Because the moment he sees his shadow, recognises his dark side, and works to overcome it, is the moment winter will be over. Phil holds the keys to ending his misery. “I make the weather,” Phil says, blizzard snow coating his face. And he’s correct. We all make our own weather. We’re all creators of our own personal winter and our own personal summer.
Ned Ryerson is an irritating leitmotif in the grand opera that is Groundhog Day. But why does the life-insurance salesman keeping popping up? “I’ve got friends of mine who live and die by the actuarial tables, and I say, hey, it’s all one great big crapshoot anywho.” That’s what he says on their first meeting, in which Phil does not buy life insurance. By the time of their last meeting, the one before Phil ends his own winter, he has taken out the largest life-insurance policy available. And why wouldn’t he? By the end of the movie, his life is finally worth insuring. He’s worked hard at becoming a valuable human being. And love is his eternal reward.
Groundhog Day is a movie that goes from asking, ‘What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today’, to ‘Tomorrow is today. It happened.’ And in that lies a powerful lesson lovingly told.