Part of the genius of Groundhog Day is that—to paraphrase Ebert (I think)—Bill Murray plays Phil as somebody who is plausibly above all this. Sure, he's a jerk and a chauvinist, but that first go-around is perfectly tooled to make you sympathetic to his jerkiness, if not the chauvinism stuff. It's not that he's some hotshot TV guy, it's that everybody around him seems myopic: their mannerisms are irritating specifically because they involve an attention to, and obsession with, little tiny things that just aren't especially interesting to begin with.
There's a line in the original Office where Tim gets a novelty beer-drinking hat for his birthday, and mentions dryly that, sure, he likes the works of Proust, but a novelty hat is fine too. In The Office, it's a sympathetic moment, because Tim, like Phil, is trapped in what seems to be a dreary, monotonous hellscape. But you could easily interpret that comment less as a plea for substance and meaning than as a snide, pretentious thing to say about a silly birthday gift. What's brilliant about Groundhog Day is that it starts Phil off as a relatable asshole, then confronts him with the things he hates the most until he learns to love them after all.
For me, the bit where he kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil and drives off a cliff is so good. It's everybody's fantasy of finally snapping at that minor thing that drives them up the wall. And plenty of movies offer power fantasies of characters taking vengeance against the petty irritations of their life (American Beauty comes to mind). But here, Phil loses it, gets his satisfaction, and... it doesn't matter. It just isn't worth a damn thing. Because no amount of Phil being irritable or weary or above it all changes the fact that this is the world he lives in, these are the people who he knows, and his only real choice is whether or not he ought to care.
Caring, of course, is what everybody else in this world does but him. Yes, they care about tiny things, trivial things, menial things—in other words, their lives. Phil can imagine better things to care about, sure, but what he can't imagine is caring about what's right in front of him.
Part of the irony of the movie, which I never really see commented on, is that Phil's first version of "caring" is basically for the purposes of manipulation. It's not "good" to memorize the movements of the folks unloading that armored truck, but it does take genuine investment. It's shallow as hell to try and learn every one of Rita's interests for purposes of seducing her, but it take Phil putting effort into learning what he doesn't already know. The irony is that this is his first step towards redemption: the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions, so to speak (at least at first).
Which leads to Phil's next plan: to become God. If he's trapped in this town, he's going to make it his town. He will take his old familiar superior self and apply it to all these little bits and pieces. Only he can't. He can't save every life. He can't right every wrong. He can't "own" Rita, or make her want anything other than what she really wants.
And Rita doesn't just want someone who cares about her, for all that she's the first person Phil winds up caring about. She wants someone who cares about everything. Someone who sees life as meaningful, not in the general but in the particular. What is meaning, after all, but connection and intent? To find things meaningful is to connect yourself with them. If you devote yourself to one person exclusively, you're still fundamentally performing a selfish and limited act, one that divorces you from the world around you. It's only when Phil truly embraces the world that Rita realizes she can love him after all—and it only takes her a day to fall in love.
I think a lot about how the Vatican called this the most religious film of all time, or what-have-you. I think that a part of that is that Groundhog Day presents two opposing visions of God. One is the God that sees all, knows all, controls all. (Would Phil really be all-powerful if he could bring back the dead and make women fall for him with a snap of his fingers? Not really—because he'd still be trapped in this place that he hates.) The other vision of God is, for lack of better words, a being that cherishes the world, and affords even the littlest pieces of it endless dignity.
Phil doesn't become God by holding himself above the world, in other words: he becomes God through an act of genuine humility, one that places him not above or below or equal to it so much as turns him into its embrace. Phil, by finally loving the world as it is, becomes something greater than Phil. He becomes the world.
Consciousness is a trickster. Simply by existing, it tells itself that it is separate from everything around it—in ways that lead to its walling itself off. But consciousness is also what lets us see others, not as equal to us, but as us: that feat of imagination and empathy and sheer heart that takes the lonely precipice we start as and broadens its ground, taking more of the world into its fold. Putting God aside, Phil starts out as the one version of consciousness—the lonely, superior kind—and ends as the other sort, the tree whose roots connect it to the Earth.
(If you want to really stretch, you can say that Phil moves on when he finally stops noticing his own shadow. But that really is a stretch.)
Religion or no, philosophy of conscious or not, I think the beauty of Groundhog Day is that it grapples with the process of becoming more human in a completely mundane, plot-driven, comedic sort of way. It's a movie about a guy trying to "earn" a girl, and it's also a movie that finds a way to overlap superficial popcorn-movie love with profound expansion-of-self love. You can watch it as a fun movie about a guy who gets into some hijinx, or you can watch it as a movie about someone learning that humanity and love are synonyms, and either way more-or-less every scene works perfectly. There's no separation between mundane and profound, local and cosmic, personal and universal. The moral of the story, really, is that there never was.
There's a line in the original Office where Tim gets a novelty beer-drinking hat for his birthday, and mentions dryly that, sure, he likes the works of Proust, but a novelty hat is fine too. In The Office, it's a sympathetic moment, because Tim, like Phil, is trapped in what seems to be a dreary, monotonous hellscape. But you could easily interpret that comment less as a plea for substance and meaning than as a snide, pretentious thing to say about a silly birthday gift. What's brilliant about Groundhog Day is that it starts Phil off as a relatable asshole, then confronts him with the things he hates the most until he learns to love them after all.
For me, the bit where he kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil and drives off a cliff is so good. It's everybody's fantasy of finally snapping at that minor thing that drives them up the wall. And plenty of movies offer power fantasies of characters taking vengeance against the petty irritations of their life (American Beauty comes to mind). But here, Phil loses it, gets his satisfaction, and... it doesn't matter. It just isn't worth a damn thing. Because no amount of Phil being irritable or weary or above it all changes the fact that this is the world he lives in, these are the people who he knows, and his only real choice is whether or not he ought to care.
Caring, of course, is what everybody else in this world does but him. Yes, they care about tiny things, trivial things, menial things—in other words, their lives. Phil can imagine better things to care about, sure, but what he can't imagine is caring about what's right in front of him.
Part of the irony of the movie, which I never really see commented on, is that Phil's first version of "caring" is basically for the purposes of manipulation. It's not "good" to memorize the movements of the folks unloading that armored truck, but it does take genuine investment. It's shallow as hell to try and learn every one of Rita's interests for purposes of seducing her, but it take Phil putting effort into learning what he doesn't already know. The irony is that this is his first step towards redemption: the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions, so to speak (at least at first).
Which leads to Phil's next plan: to become God. If he's trapped in this town, he's going to make it his town. He will take his old familiar superior self and apply it to all these little bits and pieces. Only he can't. He can't save every life. He can't right every wrong. He can't "own" Rita, or make her want anything other than what she really wants.
And Rita doesn't just want someone who cares about her, for all that she's the first person Phil winds up caring about. She wants someone who cares about everything. Someone who sees life as meaningful, not in the general but in the particular. What is meaning, after all, but connection and intent? To find things meaningful is to connect yourself with them. If you devote yourself to one person exclusively, you're still fundamentally performing a selfish and limited act, one that divorces you from the world around you. It's only when Phil truly embraces the world that Rita realizes she can love him after all—and it only takes her a day to fall in love.
I think a lot about how the Vatican called this the most religious film of all time, or what-have-you. I think that a part of that is that Groundhog Day presents two opposing visions of God. One is the God that sees all, knows all, controls all. (Would Phil really be all-powerful if he could bring back the dead and make women fall for him with a snap of his fingers? Not really—because he'd still be trapped in this place that he hates.) The other vision of God is, for lack of better words, a being that cherishes the world, and affords even the littlest pieces of it endless dignity.
Phil doesn't become God by holding himself above the world, in other words: he becomes God through an act of genuine humility, one that places him not above or below or equal to it so much as turns him into its embrace. Phil, by finally loving the world as it is, becomes something greater than Phil. He becomes the world.
Consciousness is a trickster. Simply by existing, it tells itself that it is separate from everything around it—in ways that lead to its walling itself off. But consciousness is also what lets us see others, not as equal to us, but as us: that feat of imagination and empathy and sheer heart that takes the lonely precipice we start as and broadens its ground, taking more of the world into its fold. Putting God aside, Phil starts out as the one version of consciousness—the lonely, superior kind—and ends as the other sort, the tree whose roots connect it to the Earth.
(If you want to really stretch, you can say that Phil moves on when he finally stops noticing his own shadow. But that really is a stretch.)
Religion or no, philosophy of conscious or not, I think the beauty of Groundhog Day is that it grapples with the process of becoming more human in a completely mundane, plot-driven, comedic sort of way. It's a movie about a guy trying to "earn" a girl, and it's also a movie that finds a way to overlap superficial popcorn-movie love with profound expansion-of-self love. You can watch it as a fun movie about a guy who gets into some hijinx, or you can watch it as a movie about someone learning that humanity and love are synonyms, and either way more-or-less every scene works perfectly. There's no separation between mundane and profound, local and cosmic, personal and universal. The moral of the story, really, is that there never was.