Groundhog Day: Harold Ramis’s It’s a Wonderful Life

Groundhog Day is a surprising miracle of a movie, a funny, touching, inspiring experience, the It’s a Wonderful Life for a more cynical generation. It’s rare to watch a Hollywood movie and feel like you are watching something so original, and yet seemingly so simple that you wish you had thought of it yourself. “Groundhog Day” has even entered the lexicon as a shorthand for having to face the same mundane routine over and over.

In Groundhog Day, Murray again plays the familiar smug Murray character, this time as Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman with an exaggerated sense of importance (“There’s a major network interested in me”). Forced to go to the small town of Punxutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the annual Groundhog Day ceremony, Murray acts as if he superior to everyone around him, including his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), his cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliot), and the local townspeople (“They’re hicks, Rita”). After doing a half-assed job covering the Groundhog Day ceremony, Phil is eager to get out of town, but is trapped by a blizzard that he failed to predict and must spend another night in the town.

The next morning when his alarm clock wakes him up, he hears the exact same song (“I Got You, Babe”) and the exact same banter from the DJs, who again proclaim that it’s Groundhog Day. Connors goes through his day seeing exactly the same people in the same places saying the same things. And then it happens again the next day. And the next.