What If There Is No Tomorrow...There Wasn't One Today!

I love Groundhog Day. I think it's one of the best comedies of our times, and features perhaps the best performance from Bill Murray. And that's really saying something. In its time, it did solid box office business and appealed to many critics, but nobody really saw it as anything terribly special. It was a well-performing mainstream comedy, and that's about it. But 10 years has really changed things.

It's pretty apparent that the movie has come into its own, that people are finally starting to give the movie its dues. It appears on many website lists of the Top Movies of the 90's, and I believe it to largely be responsible for the Renaissance of Appreciation that has blossomed for Bill Murray since his career-changing work in Wes Anderson's magical Rushmore.

Anyway, I'm inspired to wax philosophic about Groundhog Day because Roger Ebert has chosen it for his Great Films list. I give Rog' a lot of shit these days, because frankly, I think he's kind of lost his ability to tell solid mainstream filmmaking from mind-numbing, lame garbage. I appreciate that he's a movie critic who appreciates obscure foreign films, exploitation films and the occasional mainstream hit or genre fodder. But four stars for Ray? One and a half stars for Napoleon Dynamite? He's got some explaining to do...

Anyway, check out the Groundhog Day review. It's a pretty nice overview of what's so brilliant about the movie. And if you haven't seen it (though I find this hard to believe), it needs to go into your Netflix queue immediately.

The one thing in Ebert's article that struck me funny was his calculation of how many times Groundhog Day repeats for Phil Conners in the movie. I'd guess it would have to be several hundred. He gets to know not just one or two people in the town, but just about everybody. He masters the piano, ice sculpting and the trick where you toss the playing cards into the hat. He memorizes the pattern of cars moving to steal money out of an armored car. Plus, there's all the life-altering experiences and spiritual cleansing. Ebert says that by director and co-writer Harold Ramis' own account, Phil experiences 40 versions of Groundhog Day.

Ramis and [co-writer Danny] Rubin in an early draft had him living through 10,000 cycles, and Ramis calculates that in the current version he goes through about 40. 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.

I've heard this story as well, about how the first draft had Phil living the same day for thousands of years, eventually attaining spiritual enlightenment. But I'm still puzzled by the 40 days calculation. If you were going to learn how to ice sculpt in a little more than a month, you'd have to be working at it for hours and hours a day, right? That's even if it's possible at all. So, how would he have all that time to save homeless people, memorize Rita's favorite drink and seduce Nancy Taylor? Nope, doesn't make sense to me.

Or have I just seen this movie too many times?