It's Groundhog Day!
Since it will surely be on basic cable tonight (no tie-in is too obvious for the geniuses at TBS or USA) do yourself a favor and catch Groundhog Day. This highly under-appreciated 1993 Bill Murray comedy scores a very impressive 94% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomato-meter because it bears a strong surface resemblance to a disposable lighthearted comedy, but at its heart it is a movie that merits paying attention to. Everyone knows the film's gimmick: a TV weatherman sent to cover the Groundhog Day celebrations in Puxatawney, Pennsylvania somehow keeps waking up to find that he is repeating the same day--the eponymous Groundhog Day--over and over. That's the gimmick, but the movie is about so much more than that.
Murray is at his cynical, understated best as his character Phil Connors, a witty but self-centered jerk, moves through stages of bewilderment, arrogant hedonism, suicidal despair, and finally acceptance and a deep happiness that can only come with real wisdom. But the reason this movie is a classic and not just a good movie is that it defies attempts to turn it into a simple allegory or a sweet morality tale. I never cease to be moved at the sequence wherein we watch Phil's repeated attempts to save an unnamed homeless man who inexplicably dies on this fateful Groundhog Day. Phil feeds him, takes him to the hospital, even desperately tries performing CPR himself, but nothing works. Every day the poor man dies and there's nothing Phil or anyone else can do about it. As the nurse says to Phil, it's just his time. The message here is not a simple one, but I think that before Phil can grow and learn to love someone else he has to accept not only his own limitations but the limitations of the world around him. The movie is full of little moments like that. If you've never sat down to watch it, give it a shot.
Murray is at his cynical, understated best as his character Phil Connors, a witty but self-centered jerk, moves through stages of bewilderment, arrogant hedonism, suicidal despair, and finally acceptance and a deep happiness that can only come with real wisdom. But the reason this movie is a classic and not just a good movie is that it defies attempts to turn it into a simple allegory or a sweet morality tale. I never cease to be moved at the sequence wherein we watch Phil's repeated attempts to save an unnamed homeless man who inexplicably dies on this fateful Groundhog Day. Phil feeds him, takes him to the hospital, even desperately tries performing CPR himself, but nothing works. Every day the poor man dies and there's nothing Phil or anyone else can do about it. As the nurse says to Phil, it's just his time. The message here is not a simple one, but I think that before Phil can grow and learn to love someone else he has to accept not only his own limitations but the limitations of the world around him. The movie is full of little moments like that. If you've never sat down to watch it, give it a shot.
posted by Yukon Sully | 6:52 AM
2 Comments:
Love this movie and love Bill Murray. I have a aesthetic thing for melancholy and few people do it better than Murray. And how odd is it that this movie really demonstrates the buddhist approach to life? The truth of suffering, the truth of cause life is caused by desire and ignorance), the truth of cessation (suffering can be ended if desire and ignorance are left behind), and the truth of The Way (which has like 8 or 10 parts to it).
I don't want to give myself away as too much of a nerd (I know--too late) but I listened to the director Harold Ramis' commentary on DVD once and he noted that after the movie came out that members of every religious group from Evangelical Christians to Hasidic Jews to, yes, Buddhists approached him to tell him that his movie expressed the underlying philosophy of their faith perfectly. Truth and art are universal.
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