Funny and deep

Rating: 9/10 (8 January 2012)

I saw this again after 10 years or more had passed since my last viewing, and my appreciation of it--particularly the writing--grew enormously. I had given it 7 stars back then, but I've upped it to 9.
This time around, I see the movie as being about two things: 1) how hard it can be to get laid properly; and 2) the eternal recurrence (see Nietzsche--"Thus Spake Zarathustra," and elsewhere). The idea is, we should live our life as though it will be repeated, again and again, forever. If that were true, and we knew it, we would strive to make the day perfect in every way. Then, how much better all our lives would be!
Why not 10 of 10, then? What the movie lacks is any self-reflection at all. The ideas are there, but because they are presented in the context of a silly idea, and because Bill Murray's excellent performance--the very essence of character development--proceeds only through crude trial, error, and more trial and error, then it takes us repeated viewings to get the point.
Another qualm, somewhat minor, is that the piano teacher whom Bill Murray takes on late in the story somehow takes credit for his miraculous development as a jazz pianist: if she is like all the other characters in the story (except Murray), she has only known him for one day and could hardly think that she had taken him from rank beginner to polished professional performer in a single day. I think that by this point in the story, the writers and audience were both getting a bit weary of painstaking plot and character development and were asked to take on sudden change without question.