A touching, humanistic, philosophical masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (4 February 2009)

This is a marvelous and touching movie, a work of philosophy really, and it does what it needs to do to be popular and effective. My comments are not really criticisms of it as an effective movie, and would probably make it a less effective movie, but a more interesting work taken as philosophy.
First, it is important and valuable because it teaches that to be a good person, you must be attentive to the feelings going on inside other people, and do what you can to make good people feel better. This is similar to what makes Jane Austen so appealing: the recognition that other people's feelings matter, and that it is a moral good for each of us to recognize that, to do nothing that gratuitously makes people feel worse, and to do things that make people feel better.
Second, by confining all the action to the little town, there is a distinct 1950s nostalgic feel to the whole movie. Everyone Phil encounters is a good person, or at least, a not-bad person, even if annoying in parts. The day he lives over and over is in a town full of celebration over a very antiquated event, a very simplified human environment. The movie would have been more interesting had he been in a more troubled, complex, modern environment.
Third, Phil's existence is in effect that of a very wealthy man. He has money to buy anything he wants, since he starts over each day with all of his expenses restored. He never has to fear bad health or worry about the future or fulfill any responsibility to anyone else. And he never ages. The one thing he can carry-over from day to day is learning and training. He puts that to use almost immediately, as he learns all about the different people in the town, and learns to anticipate what each person is going to do, or to suffer, at a particular point in the day. Then he figures out that he can learn skills as well as information, so he learns piano, ice sculpture, and who knows what else. The endlessly repeating day becomes an opportunity for Phil to embark on the mother of all self-improvement, self-education programs, completely funded by God or fate. I think that he would grow to appreciate this so much that he would not want real life to "restart."
Fourth, I think that Phil's own awareness of his growing knowledge and skills, and comparison with the fact that everyone else in town makes no progress at all, would produce a change in his attitude towards the townspeople, and towards his love-interest. According to several other sources, Phil relives the one day more than 3,652 times (ten years including 2 leap- years). Ten years, every morning he sees the same attractive young woman, and she never changes. In the early period, as he gets to know her, he will grow to love her, but will he really be so lastingly enamored of her that he spends ten years trying to become a person who can evoke her to love him? His dedication to winning her love is a part of the movie-imposed context, similar to the fundamental fact that the day repeats over and over. Somehow, it is just a given that he is driven to win her love, no matter how many days he has to repeat in order to do so.
Fifth, the movie's logic is that Phil earns the right to rejoin the normal world only by becoming a person who evokes in the heart of a good woman her sincere love. In the movie, she functions as a sort of proxy for God; if you earn her love, you have earned God's approval to rejoin the human world. This is a beautiful message and a very important one to make, but it raises the question: if she had not been in the town, could Phil ever have escaped? What if his world had not included anyone whose character was so good and sweet, that she or he functioned as a kind of proxy for God's judgment, because her or his feelings towards him were a proper moral judge of his character? And if we apply the lessons of the movie to our own lives -- which is what makes the movie important -- what if there is no person in our lives who is qualified to serve that role? If we live in a world of scoundrels, is there any way in which we can prove our worth? I would like to see a "Groundhog Day" that occurs to a young man in one of our drug-gang-ridden inner cities, or to an associate in a greedy law firm, to examine this problem.
Sixth, once Phil rejoins the normal world where each day is different, where we age, where the money we spend does not magically reappear in our pockets the next morning, etc., his ten-year sabbatical will have left him almost incapable of dealing with it. Given his detailed knowledge of everyone in the town, it seems that he would set himself up as the most insightful therapist the town had ever seen, with apparently supernatural insight into every person and issue, and that he would run for mayor, be elected in a landslide, and become a famous author -- like the real "Doctor Phil" of TV and publishing fame. All this success would be founded on the ten-years' education he had obtained, absolutely for free, in the space of just one day. Phil is really a very lucky fellow.