Groundhog Day

A film set in a small town in Pennsylvania. Phil is a television reporter and arrogant. Every year he has to cover the same story: in one town a groundhog's shadow is consulted and the arrival of spring is announced. He goes with a crew, files the piece, and is stranded in the town by a blizzard. The next morning the radio opens with the same song and the day starts again. From there the film is a loop. Phil lives the same day over and over and nobody else knows. At first he is bewildered, then he uses it. He gathers information about people, lies, steals and does whatever he wants. Then he tires of it. The middle of the film is a collapse; he tries to die repeatedly and wakes in his bed every morning. Then something changes. He learns the piano, carves ice, reads a French poet, and starts helping the people in the town one by one. What the narrative is interested in is not time but character: the film gives a man unlimited time in which to be corrected and never says how long it took. The rule of the loop is never explained. Why it began, why it ends and how many days passed are left outside the narrative. The structure was written as comedy, but many people read it as a moral story; different religious communities took the film as an example of their own teaching. It was shot not in the real town but elsewhere in Illinois. Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott are in the cast. Harold Ramis directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes comedy with a tightly built idea. Who it is not for: anyone bothered by the romantic line resolving easily; the ending lands where the genre expects.