Some answers (maybe)

Rating: 10/10 (23 September 2002)

Spoilers follow.
Two questions might trouble the curious: (1) Why is Phil trapped in Groundhog Day in the first place, and (2) Why (or how) does he eventually escape? We're never told, and rightly so. The answer to the first question cannot possibly matter, unless perhaps it's part of an answer to the second; but while watching the film for the first time the second question, in the form of "What can Phil do in order to escape?", preoccupied me, and I thought he was on the right track several times: when he kidnapped and killed the groundhog, when he persuaded Rita to stay with him for the crucial hour, when he tried to save the life of the old tramp (who might, for all I knew, have been Father Time).
I think there IS an answer, to both questions, and it is this: Phil is trapped on the 2nd of February FOR NO REASON WHATEVER, and consequently there is no reason whatever for his escape. But let me consider the competing theories first.
(1) Phil is reliving the same day again and again until he gets it right. If this is so he may very well have to repeat February 3 a few times, too.
(2) Phil is trapped in order to become a better person, and so he is released when he has "made up for lost time" and done with Groundhog Day precisely as much as he ought to have done with the previous portion of his life.
(3) Phil is reliving the same day until he exhausts all the possibilities, either of the day itself or of the position he is in. This third hypothesis is a good description of what the film itself is doing - which is why it's such a great film. The FILM does what it can to exhaust the possibilities before it ends, and we feel that it has done so. Of course, it hasn't - it can't have - but perhaps Phil, in the many moments when we weren't looking, has.
(4) The same cruel demon which imprisoned Phil in a town he loathes on a day he loathes, sets him free just when he has made a permanent peace with the situation.
I like all of these theories, and I will not insist upon mine. (If mine is right, though, two things follow which feel right to me: there was no need for Phil to have escaped at all, and the fact that he ends up with the not-particularly-interesting-or-lovable Rita in his arms was pure accident... even if he lives the rest of his life as though it wasn't.) Why is this a great movie? Not because, in the end, it fails to tell us which of the five main competing possibilities is right, but because it so artlessly (and humourously) suggests all five at once.