During Viewing

When did you realize this was a comedy?

What do you see/hear in the first few minutes that tells you it is a comedy?

• Music is cheerful
• Shot of clouds and blue sky
• Blue sky to TV studio backdrop trickery
• Studio weatherman and weather map technological trickery
• Phil's TV monologue and its jokes, "Out in California they are going to have some warm weather tomorrow, gang warfare, and some very over priced real estate. Out in the Pacific Northwest as you can see they're going to have some very tall trees"
• Acting delivery, gestures, and timing
• Trickery to get from TV station to the van on the road
• "I'm your weatherman," dialogue in the van
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How does Phil cope with being trapped in time?

Attempts to solve the problem

Practical attempts to solve the problem, which fail due to time/logic problems

• Sees a doctor
• Sees a psychiatrist
• The bowling alley scene: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?" "That about sums it up for me"

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Self indulgence

• Reckless driving -- the police chase
• Over eating, "I don't even have to floss"
• Seduction of Nancy Taylor -- self-indulgent use of being given another chance. Phil uses information he learned from her one day to later convince her that they went to school together the next
• Armed car robbery
• Spaghetti western (American western made in Italy) hero going to the movie
• Seduction (attempted) of Rita using the same technique he used with Nancy Taylor: bar scene #1, bar scene #2, and bar scene #3

Disillusionment

• Disillusionment after Rita repeatedly rejects him--montage of slaps. Playing Jeopardy.
• TV broadcast--disgust. "It's going to be cold; it's going to be gray, and it's going to last you for the rest of your life." Destroying the radio -- twice.
• Kidnapping of the groundhog, car chase, and fatal crash
• Suicides
• Bathtub electrocution
• Run over by a truck.
• Jumping from a building

Reformation -- becoming a new man

• Going to bed with Rita

  They go to bed, she falls asleep while he reads poetry

  They go to bed, fall asleep

  They go to bed, he falls asleep

   

• The old beggar

  Gives him money

  Dies

  Feeds him

  Tries to resuscitate him

• The job

   

• Takes coffee to the crew and cooperates on the shoot

   

• Becomes poetic about Punxatawney on film: "When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the of warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter"

   

• Takes up piano, becomes a jazz pianist

   

• Nice to the hotel guests

   

• Takes up ice sculpture

   

• Ned Ryerson

  First gets rid of him by hitting him

  Then gets rid of him by using gay ploy

  Eventually buys insurance from him

• Rescue of boy falling from a tree

   

• Helping the old ladies with their flat tire

   

• Saves the life of the choking diner

   

• Resolves problems of the young engaged couple

   

• Has apparently become a chiropractor, treated a dancer's bad back

   

The ending is comic because it shows us that Phil still has some of the old, calculating, self inside him. As he and Rita walk out of the guest house into the new, snow-covered day, he exclaims, with his new enthusiastic wonder at life: "It's so beautiful -- Lets live here." Then, after he kisses Rita, he adds: "We'll rent to start." (Keep your options open.)