Nurse: You’re the one who brought in the old man?
Phil: How is he?
Nurse: He passed away just now.
Phil pauses for a long moment.
Phil: What’d he die of?
Nurse: He was just old. It was his time.
Phil: I want to see his chart. Excuse me.
Nurse: Sir, you can’t — Look! Some people just die.
Phil: Not today.
Phil Connors is Bill Murray who wakes up one day at 6 AM, amazed, trapped in time in the movie Groundhog Day. He falls prisoner of time on February 2.
The film that has multiple interpretations is in my opinion a process of rediscovering the present and the everyday. A task as primordial as it is complex, as rational as it is spiritual… as necessary as it is ‘procrastinated’:
1. The ‘abnormality’ of the normal: Phil Connors goes through life with reluctance, pride, vanity, “little fame”, selfishness and arrogance. He wants to do the minimum, to travel without being disturbed, to fulfill his role. Period. But when he mysteriously lives twice the same day (a fantastic event!) the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the normal becomes strange, the common becomes essential. He then wakes up everyday and…
2. Surprise! When he falls prisoner of the present, his first reaction is stupor, he feels chained and he wants tomorrow, to return to normality. The present is not his place, the here and now make him uncomfortable. This is me? Phil reacts as I suppose we would if we repeated the same day, exactly the same! again and again. Right away, we would stop liking today. Doesn’t that happen?
3. Disenchantment: it follows the disappointment. Living too long today is annoying. And tomorrow? Why this today? Why not another today from his past, a better one from his memory? He does not want to be subject to this present. So, he seeks to evade it and returns to his drowsy state. He wants it to come tomorrow.
4. Adventure: once the initial blow was over, the stage of rebellion, of fun, now begins. He can do whatever he wants today. Live without rules. And that makes him happy. The others are means to his end. Tomorrow doesn’t matter. But after a while he gets tired. Phil asks for help: first from the producer Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell) who is the closest, second from a doctor, third from a psychiatrist, fourth he starts talking to those who had made fun of him and his ramblings. He complains about the day that he has to live, it is not the one he would have chosen. The men tell him that he is a man with half an empty glass. And he asks What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? One of them responds “That about sums it up for me” He does not leave the prisons fighting against the system but against himself. Phil still wants to fight his own fate by hitting him head-on. He fails miserably again.
5. Reflection: at the next stage comes one of the fundamental questions that Phil asks Rita “If you only had one day to live, what would you do with it”. His happiness largely depends on this answer. And depth is accompanied by openness and dialogue. Rita, the show’s producer, will help him answer this. But he discovers that he is not authentic and complains: “Is this what love is to you? You never loved anyone but yourself.” Rationalizing everything, Phil can’t be authentic. So, Phil goes through two moments in the reflection stage:
• Deep fall, crisis, depression, anger. When the present is unbearable: Phil goes about his job with disgust: “I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life..” He finds a thousand ways to die every day. Phil literally executes him, but fails again. When there is nothing greater than one, you cannot do things beyond our limits. And today is an unbearable burden from which he has to free himself.
• Self-knowledge, honesty and dialogue. “I no longer exist,” Phil justifies himself. And it is true. He goes on living, but he is no longer his old ME. Rita helps him change his perspective of what is happening to him: “”Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes. I don’t know, Phil. Maybe it’s not a curse. Just depends on how you look at it.” She reminds him of a poem by Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart has ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
6. Act: In the epilogue Phil discovers that a small action today changes everything. It unleashes the best of him. He begins to think about others, with openness, dialogue, good communication, listening, generosity, he begins to appreciate life and to see and hear things that previously went unnoticed. He goes after what he now wants. An innocent humor not sour and hurtful appears. He discovers that he is not in control of his life. He seeks meaning and finds it by helping the other. Here Phil wakes up, he’s a new man. And the others discover Phil: “I didn’t know you were so versatile.”
7. Awakening: Now Phil has business to attend to, helping others, but knowing the inevitability of some things. Today he wakes up and does not seek what he wants for himself but what the other needs. Because the present badly lived encloses it in time and the present lived fully opens the door to eternity, to tomorrow, to February 3.
Agustín de Hipona said: And as for the present, if it were always present and did not become past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Our present is our eternity and as Phil we must decide what we will do with it and in it.
