There's only three words I think of...
(I
wrote this a few weeks ago before the death of Harold Ramis. When I first heard the news, I was as
nonplussed as I am with most celebrity deaths.
But as I thought about it more, I realized he had a hand in so many of
the best and most memorable comedies in the late 70’s and 80’s. Caddyshack,
Stripes, Animal House, Ghostbusters…those
movies help shape my sense of humor. He
truly influenced me more than I understood.
Rest in peace.)
Groundhog Day is not
a time travel movie. Except, it is.
First,
most people remember this 1993 film as a passable Bill Murray comedy. Funny; not a lot of quotable lines, but a
good movie. I saw it in the theater and
liked it, and years later they played the hell out of it on cable. When you really take a step back and consider
the character’s true journey beyond the goof ball antics, this is an amazing
movie.
Regarded
as one of the best scripts ever, Groundhog Day is about Phil, a weatherman in
Pennsylvania who awakens every single morning to the same day, Groundhog Day,
in Punxatawney. No matter what has
transpired, it is always that day. For
time travel purposes, this is more of an in-between concept. Phil only goes back in time one day, and his
knowledge of the future extends to one day; and it is a day he has already
lived. He retains all of the knowledge
of the repeating February 2nd’s, but no one else knows what Phil is
experiencing.
This very well could have been a
drama, and I think somewhere in the movie it does switch to dramatic
gears. The process that Phil goes
through makes the film exceptional. This
could have been some slapsticky horsecrap about winning poker hands or showing
off, and Phil goes in that direction, but it goes a lot further. At first he is perplexed and a little horrified
by where and when he is forced to endure this daily reset. After a while, he has some fun with it. He gets laid, robs an armored car, memorizes
the answers to Jeopardy!
questions. But this drains on him. Soon, he falls for the producer, Rita, and
tries to trick her into bed with information he learned previously about her to
no avail. He is dejected. He begins to lose control. He attempts suicide. Over and over and over. No matter what, he keeps waking up in the
same bed at the same time.
Right here is where the movie could
have gone astray. The fact that Phil
accepts his plight and just tries to make the best of his life is so satisfying.
He doesn’t just live it; he slowly becomes the man he always wanted to be,
which in turn gains Rita’s eventual affections He learns piano, ice-sculpting,
and performs acts of heroism and kindness to everyone in the tiny little
town. Eventually, he and Rita have a
perfect day together and they wake up together on February 3rd.
Director Harold Ramis has stated
that Phil was in a loop for at least ten years, maybe even triple that, before
he woke up to a new day. Something about
that statement made me sit back and imagine what a hell that was for the character. It was done in the guise of a comedy and cast
the perfect lead actor for the role. But the reality of a repeating day, and
years of knowledge without aging, or being away from the rest of the world for
decades is serious time travel fiction.
The warping of our knowledge of how time passes is so integral to our
view of reality. To have it skip like a
scratched record is too maddening to imagine. Imprisonment is one thing, but to
not have the passing of time to age you is torturous. No one around you is
aware of what you already know, and Phil has no idea how this happened or when
it would ever end.
The theme of the film is to fix
yourself. Phil was a miserable self-centered bastard at the beginning of the
film, but through self-awareness and kindness and giving and caring and all
that stuff that Fox News doesn’t like brought him around. It is almost as if Phil needed to earn
another day on earth. How he was
proceeding may have been even worse.
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