Groundhog Day (1993)
Director: Harold Ramis

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Smart-Alecky Shit

A Hollywood literary agent in Peter Farrelly's 1998 novel The Comedy Writer advises the aspiring screenwriter hero, "Ninety percent of all comedies written in the last ten years were written with Bill Murray in mind. And they're all the same. Some are good, most suck, bit it's the same smart-alecky shit that only Bill Murray can get away with." 1   Anyone who's kept up with comedy in the past decade will know what he's talking about. Specific examples may not leap to mind precisely because the influence is everywhere, in the atmosphere, affecting performers both good (Adam Sandler in Big Daddy) and indifferent (Matthew Perry in Fools Rush In). The reason only Bill Murray can get away with it is that the guys who, following him, keep a wisecracking distance from the normal range of human emotions are attempting to market as style what in Murray is a scathing send-up of the patent phoniness of show biz marketing. And they usually cave by the end and get behind that happy-ending feeling. But Murray's caginess is deep-seated, not just a performance style but a fundamental alignment.

During the shooting of the remarkable one-of-a-kind comedy Rushmore Murray is reported to have said to director Wes Anderson that he wanted "to go deeper" with his supporting role 2 , and the press coverage has likewise said such things as that he doesn't "play one of the goofy, funny guys who have made him famous," but gives instead "a layered, complicated performance."  3   This will make sense only to people who have forgot what his original "goofy" persona was like. As Lorne Michaels has said, "So much of my generation's approach to comedy was a reaction against the neediness of performers. When Bill was onstage, he didn't much care whether they liked him." 4 

Like the original castmembers of Saturday Night Live, whom he joined in 1977, Bill Murray developed his routines in response to the irradiated post-World War II suburban culture that they'd grown up in. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players were expert at parodying the voices of both sententious and commercial fraudulence--the gelatinous precepts learned in home, school, and church (and in the homes, schools, and churches on TV and in the movies), the nearly hysterical pitches of TV advertising, the oiliness of show biz "intimacy." It's an American problem; as George Santayana wrote in an essay published in 1922:

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf.... For the moment it is certainly easier to suppress the wild impulses of our nature than to manifest them fitly ... yet in the long run suppression does not solve the problem, and meantime those maimed expressions which are allowed are infected with a secret misery and falseness.  5 

The Saturday Night Live performers heightened the falseness, and intensity, of those conventional maimed expressions, until you couldn't ignore the implicit satire in the parody.

There was always an enormous amount of counter-culture resistance behind Murray's put-on. He gave us what we supposedly wanted from entertainers--jokes delivered with practiced smoothness, "soulful" renditions of pop songs--as a way of destroying that tradition of entertainment for us. As much as any performer he punched the hole in the keel through which irony has flooded pop culture. So he was never goofy in an uncomplicated way. Neither was Jerry Lewis, but whereas Lewis drew his power from personal disturbances while maintaining a veneer of faith in the forms of pop culture, Murray has drawn his from a detached assessment of the fakeness of the culture, which would include someone as pushily heartfelt as Lewis.

In Tootsie (1982) the function of Murray's hilarious deadpan (and reportedly improvised) comments on roommate Dustin Hoffman's scam was to turn the audience's disbelief in the farce plot to the movie's advantage. At the time Murray seemed oddly cast as an incorruptible, experimental playwright, but it isn't so hard to see his ironic, detached refusal to ape sincerity in Hollywood product as a form of fastidiousness. It was harder to understand what values that fastidiousness 6   was protecting, seeing as he had trouble for a while putting his values on the screen.

The head-on, and least satisfactory, approach produced his version of The Razor's Edge (1984), which he co-adapted and persuaded Columbia to finance by agreeing to shoot Ghostbusters (1984) first. 7   The Razor's Edge is a groaning mistake in almost every way, offering pictorial Buddhist transcendence without relinquishing the more widely appealing details of decadent western high life (elegant dining, women's fashions, slumming in Parisian boîtes) and standard crowd-pleasing footage (war scenes and travel footage). And it ends like an upbeat Gatsby, with the hero finally freed of the troublesome women. As Larry Darrell, the quester after spiritual truths, Murray does not, as critics said, make the mistake of playing the role straight. More peculiarly, he plays him as Bill Murray the kidder, which is both anachronistic for the period (roughly World War I to the early '30s) and makes the character seem as if he had psychological resources that would be inimical to scaling the Himalayas in search of the meaning of life delivered by lamas as mystic aphorisms. Murray works honestly, trying to enliven the picture and make it personal without pretending he's another sort of actor, but the main problem is that he was intellectually vulnerable to a middle-brow spiritual romance like Maugham's novel in the first place. Wanting to be profound he just got portentous.

The Razor's Edge was a callow, foolish choice as a dramatic project, yet its failure seems to have had the ideal effect: it didn't entirely dispirit Murray but rather convinced him to channel his "serious" ambitions into his comedy. What he did was to find comic scripts that feature spiritual redemption resulting from supernatural assists.

In his breakthrough performance in Scrooged (1988), an updating of A Christmas Carol, he plays Frank Cross, a top network executive who sells a live, razzle-dazzle version of Dickens by means of TV spots aimed at making viewers afraid not to watch it. (He cheers at the newspaper headline when an old woman dies after seeing one of the ads.) He's so mean to his underlings and so contemptuous of his viewers that his dead mentor returns from the grave to warn him of his eventual fate. In other words, Frank becomes the Scrooge in a "real" performance of the story he's vulgarized for his network. Murray thus found a way to play a fuller character in the kind of comedy audiences wanted to see him in simply by emphasizing the dark side of his persona so the mass audience couldn't overlook it. (Which may be why Scrooged wasn't a big hit.)

Larry Darrell in The Razor's Edge sees too much horror in France during the Great War and loses his rootedness in the elite world of Lake Forest, but it was never possible to believe in Murray as a member of that elite. Frank Cross has moved in the opposite direction, working his way up from the mailroom and sacrificing to his career everything that made him human. For the first time Murray wasn't rumpled--he had the sleekness of a top echelon media insider and still managed to show us the rot that the sleekness encased. As Frank Cross his height and bulk were overbearing in a way that clearly had an emotional cost, which we could see in the character's wax effigy face even at its most abusive or commanding. Murray was so good at suggesting spiritual malaise that it didn't have to be squeezed; the movie could stay a comedy. Though he used this updated Christmas Carol to stage his career redemption, he also used what he'd learned in his decades of rejecting show biz fakery to play the emotional scenes without excess cholesterol.

In Groundhog Day, Murray cuts it even closer to the bone because his character Phil Connors, a burnt-out Pittsburgh weatherman who loathes the Groundhog Day celebration he's assigned to cover every year, is a performer. The high concept of the picture is even niftier and more compact than in A Christmas Carol. Phil hates the small-town cheeriness of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania where the official festivities take place, and what the assignment implies about his career, so much that he turns his venom-hose on everyone: the "hairdo" anchorwoman whose headliner job he'd prefer; his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott); his beautiful novice producer Rita (Andie McDowell); the townspeople of Punxsutawney; and most amazingly, the audience he's speaking to through the TV. The Bah! humbug! sarcasm when he provides commentary on camera--"This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather"--indicates a man deeply in need of redemption. And Phil is handed a doozy: after being forced by a blizzard to stay in Punxsutawney an extra day he wakes up the next morning to discover that he's caught in a time warp, forced to relive Groundhog Day and all its festivities forever.

Phil's nastiness is openly hilarious yet terribly involuted. Someone like the landlady of the bed and breakfast he's staying in (forever) is just confused by the distance between the inane cordialities she expects to hear and what's coming out of his mouth. But someone more sensitive like Rita catches the nearly assaultive contempt; she feels the prick of the pin on the flipside of the smiley button. Phil doesn't have to be explosive to frag you--often it's the patience in his voice that lacerates. He not only patronizes you but tells you with that spelling-it-out voice that you're the kind of person who wants things spelled out. That's what makes you a loser. When the landlady makes a phatic comment about the weather, Phil answers with his TV spiel, including the gestures, saying in essence to the woman that no exchange with him can be trivial. If it is he's got to rub your nose in it. The abrasively empty form of his "charm" not only expresses his bitterness but is also the cause of it: he cannot abide the empty forms of daily co-existence.

But you can't be serious with Phil, either. At one point when the hamster-wheel repetition has scared him beyond total sarcasm, he starts asking Rita about herself and she parries his questions bluntly: "Is this for real, Phil, or are you just trying to make me look like a fool?" We recognize that the threat in Murray's attitude resides in the fact that he can always be less serious than anyone he's talking to and, by extension, us. There are no values that a person can stand behind, and the slickness of Phil's insult is a trap for his victims, because being smart enough to pick up on them doesn't exempt you from their impact. Phil Connors is like the narrator in William Gass's story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" who muses fiercely, "I wanted to be famous, but you bring me age--my emptiness. Was it that which I thought would balloon me above the rest? [...] I want to rise so high ... that when I shit I won't miss anybody." 8   What gives Phil depth is that his contempt clearly starts with himself.

Frank Cross, the TV executive, is a hyperbolic monster, the allegorical purveyor of the crap entertainment that Murray has always been undermining from the inside. Frank is one of the suits who stand as profit-protecting gatekeepers between the audience and original performers, writers, directors, and producers, one of the men who kept comedians like the Not Ready for Prime Time Players out of prime time. In other words, to someone like Murray, Frank is the Enemy.

In contrast, Phil's disgust with himself seems more life-sized, and it makes personal sense for Murray to play a man who has been drained of life in front of a camera rather than in an executive boardroom. Playing the same shtick day after day is the fate of all popular comedians. Repetition is the Catherine-wheel they're broken on. (Think of Paul Reubens.) And Murray knows in his bones how to show us what it's like to be deep-frozen in a media image, how remote your own and other people's responses become. The opening sequence is a perfect cameo of this kind of performer's estrangement: Phil is doing the weather live, gesticulating in front of the blank blue screen as he reads his forecast, with "personality," of course, watching himself on TV where the map of the States has been mixed in. So even Phil has to watch himself on the box, that's where the reality of his work is housed.

Murray uses the disruption of Phil's routine to flip his own professional lid and to show us exactly what he always protected with comic cynicism. Murray exposes the emotional springs of his comedy--disgust that people don't have better things to do with their time than spend it being worked over by pros who make them feel the most obvious, least demanding emotions. He even allows the other characters to laugh at him--once--after Phil has made a pompous speech and walked off, and Larry says to Rita, "Did he actually call himself 'the talent'?"

What's honest about the movie is that Murray acknowledges that his contempt for pop culture has been real but also that it can be an easy form of corruption itself, easier than learning how to connect with people meaningfully. Which is not to say that Murray's contempt has been merely calculated or cheaply cynical. During his endless day in Punxsutawney, Phil is accosted by Ned Ryerson, a former high-school classmate who now sells insurance, played with scary-clown energy by Stephen Tobolowsky. The character's ghoulish resilience to rebuff is an off-note in the movie, pressuring us for response more than any other element. We have to pull back from him, and there's no mistake that in these moments we share Phil's reaction. (Even fresh-baked Rita shares it at the end when she meets him, so we know it's meant as a proper response.) Ned is the spirit of deranged normalcy that baby boomer kids perceived growing up, the spirit that led them to produce and consume drop-out comedy. Thus, Murray's recoil has been a true reflex for his generation that he and his fellow comedians won't relinquish. But having become a popular comedy style this recoil itself has also become a trap, and in the movie repetition represents for Phil not only the killing demand on show business personalities but the process of finding meaning within that demand--practicing life in and out of the spotlight until you get it right.

So the road back for Phil is not going to be as easy as correcting the mistakes at hand (e.g., raising Bob Cratchit's pay). Phil's is a thick carapace. When he wakes up for the first repetition of the day and hears the previous day's spiel from the guys on the radio morning show he assumes that they've stupidly played yesterday's tape over. That is, he assumes that disruptions of existence result from rubes not knowing how to produce media shows properly. What ensues day after day is a rolling realization of the implications of really living life. At first he simply feels freed from consequences. He can eat nothing but pastries, smoke cigarettes, drive recklessly, get thrown in jail. A more elaborate advantage is that he knows what's going to happen so he can time the inattention of an armored car's drivers in order to walk off with a bag of money.

More insidiously, since he remembers what he learns in the day that gets repeated, but other people don't, he can ask women questions about their past and their preferences one day and on the next run-through feed it back to them in order to get them in bed. If he accidentally calls a pick-up "Rita" while making out, he can propose marriage to cover for it. If, when Rita herself says she majored in 19th-century French poetry in college and he blurts out, "What a waste of time!" it's okay because there's always tomorrow to say what she'll want to hear. This makes living that one day easier in some ways, but also more difficult, as we see when he plays Rita mostly right for an entire day, and then blows it in every repetition because the cynical attitude behind his effort gives him an off-putting touch. (There's a classic comparison of fun-in-the-snow when Phil clicks with Rita one day and then overdoes it the next, hysterically throwing himself at her like a badly programmed replicant of a fun guy.) And the ease of it all in itself underlines the meaninglessness, so for a stretch Phil is moved to commit suicide early in the day just to avoid one go-round.

What Phil finally catches onto is that he can spend his time doing things that make him feel better about himself (helping an old derelict rather than brushing him off), reading, taking piano lessons. (This last is especially funny because he keeps improving while the eternal resetting of the calendar means that as far as his teacher knows he's always arriving for his first lesson. Danny Rubin, who wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay, and Harold Ramis, the co-scenarist and director, are fully aware of the silly knots this kind of time warp concept ties.) Finally, Phil doesn't have to work at impressing Rita, and Murray truly relaxes in the role of a man who can simply and infectiously enjoy himself. By drilling down to genuine sources of comic redemption, even more so than he did in Scrooged, Murray has fulfilled a promise we never expected him to make.

Murray isn't the only person raised by the story. Harold Ramis outdoes himself as a director as well. Caddyshack (1980), Ramis's first picture as director, had exactly one expert scene, when Chevy Chase's golf ball landed in Murray's dump of a dwelling and, being too honest a golfer to improve his lie, he had to talk to Murray's idiot groundskeeper while trying to drive his ball out of there. Ramis gave the comedians the room they needed to carry on a deceptively laid-back duel. In Club Paradise (1986), Ramis had a much faster-paced star in Robin Williams, but the movie took off only in the supporting comedians' scenes as hapless island vacationers. Ramis's special talent here was to respect their nuttiness and tailor their bits to their wide-ranging styles.

In Groundhog Day Ramis finally got in sync with a dominating star. He's more tactful than ever--when Rita puts Phil down by reciting a Walter Scott poem, the camera moves in only slightly on her as the always underrated McDowell delivers this literary anathema on a salver. But Ramis also keeps pace with Phil in his comic agony. Repetition with an unpredictable difference is the essence of the story, which means that the director has to vary the rhythm just to convey what's happening to Phil. Ramis knows when to replay something we've seen or heard in full and when he can elide. For instance, that annoying radio spiel first tells us that time has stopped; later Ramis simply has Phil lie in bed one morning and run through it verbatim in a funereal voice. There are enclosed speeded-up patches, for example, when it takes Phil a few days to figure out how to get through to Rita by ordering her favorite drink in a bar, that show Ramis's rheostat responsiveness to gradations. You feel his hands on the controls but he always works them to serve the performers and the material. Though the movie got superb reviews, they were good reviews "for a comedy"--not good enough. This is a stunningly alert piece of directing, with a combination of braininess, frolic, and jazz dynamism at times reminiscent of Louis Malle.

Ramis's direction is alert enough to get you past fundamental problems. Pop redemption movies like this never tell you anything very profound or even practical about how not to waste your life. A Christmas Carol is emotionally effective not because of what we expect Scrooge to do in the future, but because of the pathos of the scenes that have driven him down his twisted, ever lonelier path. As Frank Cross Murray the actor was still least sure when most sincere--in the last scene in which he disrupts his own live broadcast and is so transformed that his black secretary's mute child speaks up for the first time since his father died.

In movies a man's career crisis is usually a moral crisis as well. Groundhog Day pushes both to the point of existential farce and is self-aware enough to tease Phil's redemption. At one point the reborn Phil quotes Chekhov to say that he hopes winter lasts a long time, and then in the big finale he plays jazz piano while citizen after citizen comes up to thank him for his superhero interventions in their lives. The makers overdo it as a way of acknowledging that they can't really do "it," can't tell us how to live better. At least they know that. But as comedy Groundhog Day does move convincingly from endless winter toward spring, represented by Rita's genuine appreciation of the life force around her even in the corny forms that hicks enjoy. McDowell's Rita is so refreshing she believably revives Phil. She resurrects him from the tomb of his constrictive ironic superiority, i.e., the foundation of Murray's career but not the full extent of his sensibility, and Bill Murray makes peace with his audience.

1. Ninety percent: Farrelly, Writer 63. (return to text)
2. go deeper: Winters 20. (return to text)
3. play one of the goofy, funny guys: Hirschberg 18. (return to text)
4. Lorne Michaels: Hirschberg 20. (return to text)
5. George Santayana: "Carnival" 139. (return to text)
6. The nature of his fastidiousness often comes out in interviews, for instance, when he answered Wes Anderson's question about why he agreed to appear in Rushmore: "When I read Rushmore I figured the writing was so specific that whoever wrote it knew exactly what they were going to shoot. I never have a problem with guys who make a movie that misses as long as they make the movie they want to make" (Murray). (return to text)
7. persuaded Columbia: Hirschberg 22. (return to text)
8. Gass: 189. (return to text)