“Larry, what do you think?” from Groundhog Day (1993)

With the big day (February 2nd) nearly upon us, I thought I would use the opportunity to examine the Small Moment that really stood out to me on a recent revisit of Groundhog Day. It is the moment that, for me, answers the question of what the film is about: what its protagonist really learns, and what we as viewers can learn from it.

First up, I should just state that, more than 20 years later, this movie really holds up, as so few comedies from the early 90s seem to. Groundhog Day is routinely heralded as one of the all-time great film comedies, and it is not hard to see why – from script to cast to direction to editing, from inception to execution, this is pretty much a perfect movie.

Its basic premise is an intriguing one, although by no means does it automatically guarantee comic gold. It’s not hard to imagine the same idea, in different hands, being either maddeningly repetitive, or puerile or simply wasted.

Director Harold Ramis and his co-screenwriter Danny Rubin, however, manage to squeeze virtually every drop of available juice out of their core idea: a man trapped in time, forced to relive the same day over and over again while all around him go about their day, blissfully oblivious to his plight.

Not only do Ramis and Rubin craft this premise into something supremely funny, they also succeed in turning their film into a profound meditation on – you guessed it! – The Human Condition. There are very few Bill Murray films that are routinely taught in college philosophy classes. This is one of them. I think maybe Meatballs might be another.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt the film that the time-trapped man in question, weatherman Phil Connors, is played by Murray at the peak of his powers. And we don’t just get one Bill Murray. As Connors’ understanding of his situation develops, we are treated to a veritable Taster’s Choice sampler of the many flavours of Murray.

Initially, of course, we see cocky asshole Murray – not far from, say, his Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Connors is a weatherman (sorry, meteorologist) with a profoundly overinflated sense of self-importance. This position of acerbic arrogance is the ledge from which he will spend the next 90 minutes falling. Phil’s ego is the shiny, glistening bubble that the film is about to take such pleasure in popping.

As events unfold, as February 2nd starts repeating itself – for reasons which, THANK GOD, the filmmakers never choose to explain (one can only imagine the studio notes they must have had to defuse, along the lines of “We need to know WHY this is happening to him!”) we see Murray as Connors scrambling around in confusion, fear, panic. He is like a fly trapped between a cup and a windowpane. Flailing, he seeks medical help (from Ramis himself, unable to detect any abnormalities on an X-Ray) he seeks psychiatric help (from Chicago improv legend Dave Pasquesi, as a rattled young shrink way out of his depth). No answers come. Rationality isn’t helping.

So next up is dejection. Phil is stuck. Like his sad-sack bar buddies, nothing he does can or will ever make any difference. Cue: a late-night joyride that ends up with Phil in jail and, next morning, right back in his B&B bedroom. Wow. This unlocks in him a delirious kind of elation. Nothing matters. No consequences. He can do anything. He can eat anything. He can punch out the annoying recurring character Ned Ryerson (“BING!”). He can rob a bank truck. And still the roller-coaster of emotions continues. Next stop: Horny. Phil’s repeated attempts to trick cute local girl Nancy, then Andie MacDowell’s Rita, into bed do carry an unsavoury whiff of the sexual politics of yesteryear. These attempts, along with a couple of musical choices, may be the only thing in Groundhog Day that has aged badly. (Although, to be fair, the film doesn’t seem to be condoning his behaviour here – in fact, he is repeatedly rebuffed. With only a day to play with, he is simply moving too fast.)

Then comes emptiness. The void. Solitude. This is Phil’s nadir. This is the endless winter of life in the groundhog’s shadow. Repeated suicide attempts are to no avail – he just twangs right back to that soul-destroying 6:00am Sonny & Cher wake-up call. “Well put your little hand in mine…”

(As I write, it occurs to me that the above listed stops on the emotional roller coaster have a lot in common with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous Five Stages of Grief, and with the colourful emotional archetypes buzzing around in the head of little Riley in Pixar’s excellent Inside Out: another film that seems to have been embraced by the philosophers and psychologists. Someone should probably do a comparative analysis that maps these onto each other. That someone … is someone else.

Because here comes the Small Moment.)

It comes just after a pivotal day, one in which Phil manages to convince Rita of what is happening to him, and to spend the day with him as kind of a ‘science experiment,’ we see him deliver a moving monologue to her while she sleeps, expressing what a kind, generous person she is, and the effect that she has on him. It may be Phil’s first truly calm, unguarded moment in the film – something really seems to have shaken loose, or settled, inside him.

The ‘following’ day we see him striding back towards Gobblers Knob (that name! really??) for the Groundhog festivities, with a tray of coffee and pastries in hand. He distributes these to a shocked Rita and Larry the cameraman, before telling them, “Say, I was just talking to Buster Green, he’s the head Groundhog honcho, and he says that if we set up over here we might get a better shot.” To Rita he asks, “Whaddya think?” She’s all in favour. Then Phil turns to Larry and says, “Larry, what do you think?”

This is the Small Moment. This single line to Larry, asking what he thinks. There’s something oddly moving about it. Until now, Larry (played by Chris Elliot) has been a figure of ridicule for Phil: a put-upon underling who privately hates his boss but has no choice but to put up with his snarky jibes. In this moment, though, all that seems to be forgotten. As Phil looks to him, genuinely keen to know his opinion, Larry practically melts right there on the spot. All he has ever wanted is to be respected, to be treated well, maybe to have some creative input. All this history is immediately visible in how Elliot plays the moment – a wonderfully understated smile and, “Yeah, let’s go for it.”

So what is Groundhog Day about? What does Phil learn? What is it that unlocks his time loop and allows him to return to his life’s sequential stream of days? What he learns is simple, and yet impossibly complicated: stop struggling. Don’t panic. Enjoy this moment, and do what you can to help others enjoy it too.

There is a Buddhist meditation practice called metta bhavana, or ‘Loving Kindness,’ that asks its practitioners to first feel compassion and kindness to themselves, then to someone they care about, then to a ‘neutral’ person for whom they have no strong feelings, then finally to someone with whom they have a difficult relationship. This four-stage progression through these ever-widening circles of compassion is intended to induce a state of universal benevolence. That is the state that Phil seems to have arrived at here. (Oh yeah, Buddhists love this movie.) (Or, you know, they have no strong feelings of attachment to it whatsoever, but they agree with its message.) Phil has no agenda with Larry. He doesn’t want anything from him, beyond for him to have a pastry and a coffee, and to get the best possible shot of the Groundhog proceedings.

This Small Moment marks the beginning of a transformation. In the film’s final act, we see Phil begin to go deeper, to do good for its own sake, to work on himself, to learn to play the piano and sculpt ice with a chainsaw. We see a man at peace. He’s not struggling, he’s not despairing, he’s not running amok: he’s just living. When he says to Rita, in the film’s closing line, “Let’s live here,” I had always thought the focus was on the ‘here’ part, and on the neat reversal of Phil growing to love this weird little town he had previously hated. But now, I think there’s an awful lot packed into the ‘live.’

Groundhog Day isn’t asking too much of us. It just wants us to live. And maybe that process starts when we find the Larry in our lives, and we hand them a coffee and a pastry, and look them dead in the eyes and ask – sincerely, with no agenda – “Larry, what do you think?”