hil Connors (Murray) is an embittered, unpleasant small-time TV weatherman who hates his job and his co-workers and loathes the idea of broadcasting yet another report from Punxsutawney, home of the annual Groundhog Day festival. On the day he's awarded the despised assignment, he's introduced to his new segment producer, Rita (MacDowell). He's attracted to her, but he cannot turn off his abrasive personality, and it doesn't take long before she sees him as the overbearing, cynical, angry man he is.
Arriving with Rita and their cameraman, Larry (Elliott), Connors broadcasts the hated segment and tries to rush his crew out of town. But a freak storm, which closes the main road, turns them back, forcing Connors and crew to stay for another night. And when the bedside alarm rouses him the next morning, Connors finds to his dawning horror that it's Groundhog Day again. He will have to relive it, again and again, free to change his own behavior in any way he wants, but forever trapped among other people who have no idea that their immediate history is now an infinitely repeating loop.
Though his first reactions are disbelief and panic, Connors is delighted when he realizes he lives in a world without consequences. He can stuff himself with junk food, seduce women with inside knowledge of the lines most likely to charm them, practice and carry out perfect crimes, punch out an unpleasant high-school acquaintance or act like a complete fool, always secure (or lost) in the knowledge that the counter will be reset to zero the next morning. The one thing it seems he can't do is get Rita to fall in love with him. He comes close, by playing to her preconceptions, but somehow she always decides she wants nothing to do with him.
When even a series of spectacular suicides, all erased by the following day, fails to free him from this endless cycle, Connors emerges from despair, looks outside himself, and begins using his extensive inside knowledge to arrange a perfect Groundhog Day for everybody.
Practice indeed makes perfect
Richard A. Lupoff once wrote a story called "12:01 P.M.," about an unlucky Manhattanite forever trapped to repeat the hour between noon and 1 p.m. He can eat lunch, wander, meet pretty girls, engage in arguments, run amuck or entertain his every whim, but when the hour is up he finds himself reset beneath the big clock at Grand Central Terminal, with no recourse but to live that hour yet again. He is doomed to spend eternity accomplishing absolutely nothing, with even death denied him.
The Lupoff story was brilliantly adapted in 1990, in a short film by the same title, with a heartbreakingly desperate lead performance by the character actor Kurtwood Smith. (Burn bridges to seek out a copy, if you must; it's a little masterpiece.) It was subsequently filmed again in the full-length, but much less impressive, TV-movie "12:01" (no "P.M."), which abandoned the horrific nature of its protagonist's plight for, well, not very much worth remembering.
The third go-round of the basic idea, Groundhog Day, which bears no admitted connection with its thematic predecessors, is remembered by most people as a light comedy. But though it gives its beleaguered weatherman a full day to relive ad infinitum, and wrings its fantastic premise for every possible dollop of absurdity, it doesn't skimp on the terror, either. The panic Connors experiences as he gradually realizes that this impossible situation is really happening to him may be funny as hell, but it's also as unrelenting. The depression he descends into later, when amusing himself with consequence-free behavior finally palls, is also funny as hell, but again, just as genuine. By the time we reach the series of spectacular suicide attempts that fail to free him from his dilemma—that instead send him back to the room of his bed and breakfast, where the alarm clock once again rouses him with the vapid tones of "I've Got You Babe"—the film is, for the moment, not funny at all. The poor guy has no clue and no future and no hope and no escape route. With no place to go, it would have taken very little change in emphasis to render this entire tale as horrifying as Lupoff's.
What ultimately makes Groundhog Day a classic—and turns this version of the tale as hopeful as "12:01 P.M." was despairing—is the epiphany that gives Connors his escape route: that even though he's trapped in his circumstances, he can still devote all his energy toward becoming the best man he can be.
Bill Murray's nuanced lead performance is an early glimmer of his transition from the wild man of his early over-the-top comedies to the more melancholic, inwardly haunted but no less funny characterizations he's provided his more recent roles. Andie MacDowell, whose career has not always been as blessed, is both luminous and utterly persuasive as the love interest, sweet and demanding enough to keep Connors going as he spends years of subjective life trying to be worthy of her. The film is also marked with a constellation of vivid supporting performances by the character actors who embody the many inhabitants of this stuttering timeline: with Robin Duke, Maria Geraghty and Stephen Tobolowsky being especially fine. Putting a ribbon on the whole thing as well as anything can is the local loser, played by comedian Rick Ducommun, who, asked what he'd do if he had to live the same day over and over, with nothing he does ever changing anything, mutters a glum: "Pretty much sums it up for me."
