WHATCHA WATCHIN'? 11. Groundhog Day (1993)

“Oh, let's not spoil it!”

Groundhog Day (1993); directed by Harold Ramis; written by Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin, from a story by Rubin; produced by Harold Ramis and Trevor Albert; music by George Fenton; cinematography by John Bailey; editing by Pembroke J. Herring; distributed by Columbia Pictures; for full details and awards, go here.

Yes, Groundhog Day has come and gone. It’s a day that never made much impression on me until Harold Ramis, with co-screenwriter Danny Rubin, created the film of that name. It’s such a striking “celebration” of the day that it became at once a tradition in my house to watch it every year when the otherwise easily ignorable “holiday” comes around. And this year—2015—was particularly fitting as we were in great expectation, here in the Northeast, of a “big blizzard thing.” We did get snowfall in Connecticut that was not negligible, and which, compared to predictions, was a bit more inconvenient than the “historic” storm of the previous week (what was that line about “count the storms of winter”?). Anyway, there is plenty of snow in bulk on the streets to foil parking and travel, and walking the sidewalks requires a certain amount of strategy.

So, why not resuscitate my “50 Since 1970” series with a choice that makes it on because, yeah, I watch it at least once a year and it’s well on its way to “beloved” status. We lost Harold Ramis last year, in February no less, who was a comic presence well-liked since his brief stint with the initial cast—he was one of the chief writers—of Second City TV.

Ramis’s odd-ball genius is best represented by Groundhog Day, a film rather sui generis. It’s a comedy of (bad) manners, it’s a romantic comedy, it’s a comic quasi-Twilight Zone situation. News weatherman, and perennial misanthrope, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) gets trapped in a time warp that means he has to keep reliving February 2nd in Punxsutawny, PA, home of the groundhog, also named Phil, whose ability to see his shadow predicts the number of weeks to spring. Phil is there to cover the happy-go-lucky shenanigans with his new gee-willikers-style producer, Rita (Andie McDowell), and sniping camera-man, Larry (an essential Chris Elliott). Phil is fed up with just about everything and lets us know it in what is still one of Bill Murray’s best performances to date. Murray rose to fame as a lovable wise-ass, his knowing smirk one of the key features of Saturday Night Live during his time on the show. He often plays the type who doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is all-too-ready to play anyone as a fool. People tend to become his straightmen, willy-nilly. That’s very much the case here and his chagrin at getting stuck in Punxsutawny due to that blizzard is palpable enough. Then we get to experience the ultimate bummer when he realizes—with a range of emotions, from panic to glee to depression to delusions of grandeur, and, finally, acceptance and humility—that he is stuck in the same day, possibly forever.

Do you ever feel that other people are little wind-up robots doing and saying what they’ve been programmed to say and do? Well, that’s very much the case here as Phil gets to alter the script only so much. Everyone else is more or less in a state of repetition compulsion while he gets to be the free agent, within the limitations of the day and place. We get glimpses of just how far afield Phil can take his furloughs from his assignment: since he remembers what happens on each successive Groundhog Day and everyone else experiences the day for the first time, he’s able to lift huge sums of money, seduce a local woman as though he knew her in high school, joy ride without fear of lasting reprisal, eat like there’s no consequences to indulging his sweet tooth, and, when it all becomes too much, try offing himself in a variety of ways. He also begins to take an interest in Rita, who he initially brushed off as too lightweight and goody-goody.

There follows the kind of sequences that make this a good date movie too. Everyone knows those “first date” blunders that some never manage to recover from. As when Phil sneers at Rita’s major in college (French poetry) or when, winning near the goal on a few tries thanks to spontaneous laughter on her part, he tries vainly to recreate “the moment.” This is where the subtlety of the script becomes apparent: how many ways can Phil be foiled in trying to fuck Rita? Every way possible until, finally, he actually becomes, by befriending everyone and acting as an agent of mercy in any situation that could prove harmful for others on that day in that town, the kind of guy she could fall in love with. At which point Phil is no longer the Phil we started with. It’s as if Sisyphus has to keep rolling that damned rock up the hill till he figures a few things out.

Along the way there are many, many replays that repay the attention, so much so that the film becomes “one of those movies”: the kind that gets referenced in general interaction, its lines and situations applicable to the business of living “stuck in the same place where nothing you did makes any difference.” At one point, Phil, driven to despair by his inability to manipulate Rita—even after he sincerely tries to earn her affection—gives us the mantra for February: “It’s going to be cold, it’s going to be gray, and it’s going to last you the rest of your life.”

The setting of the film, the homey Illinois town that stands-in for Punxsutawny, looks better as time goes on. It’s a bit like another town we revisit each year, where Jimmy Stewart has a dark night of the soul on Christmas eve, which means it has average people doing average things with an average degree of acceptance of their place in life. Phil is the one who doesn’t get it, until he does. One of my favorite scenes along that journey is a brief shot of him sitting in the diner reading in the afternoon. It’s a glimpse of the kind of thing I associate with being in grad school (the film was released not long after I took my generals), where a good part of the day is spent reading and the world around you tends to become a warm cocoon of people doing their appointed tasks. In the scene, Murray looks up and looks around with that exact feeling of gratitude to the here and now that I recall feeling a few times. And one of the books on the table is Ulysses by James Joyce, who just happened to be born on February 2nd, and whose masterpiece examines one day in the life of an average guy.

And that, I suppose, is a way of saying that this is a literate comedy too. Something that was hard enough to find after the run Woody Allen had of excellent films to the end of the Eighties. At one point, Phil, newly inspired in his groundhog coverage, cites Chekhov, and later learns to play Rachmaninoff. That detail alone suggests how long, in terms of his experience, this purgatory lasts. If you ever need a figure for what it means to atone, this film should do it.

There’s great support for Murray too—from McDowell of the girl-next-door charm, the occasional hot pout and the leonine hair, to Chris Elliott’s smart-alecky sidekick, to Stephen Tobolowsky as the unforgettable Ned “Needle-nose” Ryerson, a “giant leech” in the form of a rather squirrelly insurance salesman, to Bill’s older brother Brian Doyle-Murray as the fond Mayor of the town, to a cameo by Ramis as a doctor consulted early on, to Dan Pasquesi as a timid shrink, to Marita Geraghty as the perennial high-school girl, Nan-cy, Nan-cy Tay-lor!, and don’t overlook an early sighting of Michael Shannon, Oscar-nominated actor (for Revolutionary Road), as Fred, the guy so buzzed about getting Wrestle-mania tickets.

Warm, funny, quirky, with enough fed-uppedness for just about any February, Groundhog Day is certainly one of the best comedies of the Nineties, one of the best “feelgood movies” of all time, and a big step along the way for Bill Murray from playing snarky, fatuous guys—for which Ghostbusters is still the best—to playing guys “with soul,” as for instance in Wes Anderson movies. In fact, that transition is the point of this movie.

50 Since 1970

WHATCHA WATCHIN'? 10. Ed Wood

“This is the one. This is the one I’ll be remembered for.”

Ed Wood (1994); directed by Tim Burton; written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, based on the book Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey; produced by Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi; music by Howard Shore; cinematography by Stefan Czapsky; editing by Chris Lebenzon; distributed by Touchstone Pictures; Awards: Best Supporting Actor: Martin Landau; Best Make-Up: Rick Baker, Ve Neill, Yolanda Toussieng; for a full list of awards and nominations, go here.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Ed Wood (1924-1978) directed some of the most inept films ever to grace television broadcasts.  If you grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies, as Tim Burton did, you probably saw some of them on the “schlock-shock theaters” that showed B-grade and below movies as Saturday matinees and late night insomniac broadcasts.  Wood’s films—the most famous is Plan Nine from Outer Space (1956), the most notorious is Glen or Glenda (1953)—were so spectacularly silly that they attained cult status and drew kudos from those who loved to mock them.  Wood, we might suppose, is an unlikely subject for a biopic, though we might also imagine that such a film, if playing it straight, might contain some pathos, as there is perhaps none so sad as he who thinks he’s great, and isn’t.  Tim Burton’s film is not the life of Wood; it is a stylized treatment of Wood (Johnny Depp) that draws upon some of the DIY auteur’s cinematic style to deliver a portrait of a kind that an Andy Warhol would understand: an imitation, a pop-fantasy, a paean to kitsch and cliché and visionary incompetence.

Shot in black and white, with a great score by Howard Shore, the film is one of Burton’s most unique; it’s also fairly brave of him, and dates from the era before his long slide into bad revisions from other sources  that began just after the turn of the century (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, etc).  Ed Wood is a film about loving films, no matter how bad they are, and Burton’s loving recreations of Wood’s methods are priceless—as when we watch Béla Lugosi (Martin Landau), then Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele) walk across a flimsy set, making the same gestures to mime grief, and responding to Wood’s prompt: “You want to keep moving. You have to get through that door.”  Johnson almost doesn’t get through the door, colliding with the wall and making the set shake.  That shot remains in Wood’s film.  And the sequence of Lugosi wrestling a fake octopus with no motor is top notch, as is Ed and Béla watching a Creature Feature together on Halloween.

Wood, as played by Johnny Depp, is the ultimate naif, and Depp makes all of his character’s oddity likeable and homey.  Wood liked to wear women’s clothing, finding comfort in the textures, particularly angora, and one scene where he reveals his predilection to his girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) is done as a do-or-die moment of self-revelation; later, after Dolores leaves him, Wood reveals his fetish to his new girlfriend, Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette) in a stalled funhouse.  The setting has the cartoonishness of most of Burton’s efforts at creepiness, giving us a feel for the funhouse origins of his sense of style.  Kathy has no problem with Wood’s tendencies and they live happily ever after as a couple.

As a director, Wood finds himself up against one set-back after another.  His doggedness is inspiring in some ways—and some of his efforts recall those of John Waters, another cult director with a love of the kitschy, the trashy, the garish and the weird.  Wood, in real life, never attained the skill of Waters, but, for the purposes of Ed Wood, we can almost pretend he did.  The screenwriters give Wood a great scene during the filming of Plan 9: Wood, annoyed with the intrusions of his financial backers, stalks off the set and goes to a bar.  Who should be slumped in a booth but Orson Welles himself!  Played with an earnest scowl and a dubbed voice by Vincent Donofrio, Welles bucks Wood up by telling him of the problems he faces in making his own films. It’s a moment of savvy film awareness. Welles, generally hailed as a genius as a film-maker, faced all kinds of difficulties and disasters in getting money for his projects and in bringing them off according to his intentions. The film industry, we see, is a hurdle for the driven originals in the field, for the likes of visionaries like Welles and Wood!  

As wry as that little jab is, there is great affection behind it too—and both sentiments inspire the portrayal of Béla Lugosi, an Oscar-winning role for Martin Landau (the make-up for the role also earned Rick Baker and his team Oscars as well). Lugosi is depicted as in his last gasps as an actor, struggling with a morphine habit and reduced to the dire straits that many has-beens find at the end of their time. Lugosi was an international icon thanks to his performance in Tod Browning’s Dracula, but most of his films are B-level horror and suspense fodder. Burton’s film gets a bit edgy in its depiction of the depths to which Lugosi has sunk (which is mostly fictional but which gives the film much of its darkness), and what’s remarkable is how comic and warm the scenes with Lugosi manage to be: Landau infuses toughness, egotism, pathos, professionalism, friendliness, scariness, and a very human humor into his Lugosi. It’s truly a remarkable portrayal and sets the standard of the film  To be good enough to accommodate Landau’s Lugosi, the film has to be very good, and it is.

The interplay between Depp and Landau carries much of the film, but there are many great supporting roles: Sarah Jessica Parker is suitably brittle as the long-suffering Dolores, dumped from a prime role because a supposed backer wants to play the part; Patricia Arquette is soulful and devoted as Kathy; Bill Murray is a far cry from his glib wise-guy roles as Bunny Breckenridge, a sad-sack queer who helps Ed find transvestites for Glen or Glenda and then plays “the Leader” in Plan 9; Jeffrey Jones, one of Burton’s recurring character actors, plays the charismatic Criswell, a supposed psychic who provided voice-overs for some of Wood’s films (Wood often shot with no sound or used stock footage)—Jones memorably opens the film in a coffin, giving a mock warning to viewers about the shocking nature of the film they’re about to see.

With atmosphere a-plenty, including great set work to create a B-movie version of Hollywood, and great fun showing the rigors, the compromises, the bathos and the camaraderie of film-making, with a sympathetic glimpse of the difficult task of causing suspended disbelief (especially with the money men), and with odd and memorable characters, especially an indelible portrayal of an aged and ailing old movie star fallen into the dregs of movie-making, Ed Wood is one of Tim Burton’s least successful films (in box office returns) and one of his best. That’s largely because of the quality of the writing here, something Burton seems not to care about much once he becomes an enormous box office draw. The film makes a point, in the context of films of the Nineties: the schlock of Wood’s films is in part due to lack of professionals and lack of budget; the high-grossing schlock that tops the charts in the Nineties and after, which are largely little more than B-movies with budgets and know-how—and Burton is among the culprits—has no such excuse.

50 Since 1970

WHATCHA WATCHIN'? 9. The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover

“…the clever cook puts unlikely things together”

The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989): directed by Peter Greenaway; written by Peter Greenaway; produced by Pascale Dauman, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, Kees Kasander, Denis Wigman; music by Michael Nyman; cinematography by Sacha Vierny; editing by John Wilson; costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier; distributed by Miramax Films; for a list of nominations and awards, go here.

Opulence. Decadence. Violence. The late Eighties have been likened to the Baroque era in various ways, but English director Peter Greenaway made a more telling connection in The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover: he recreates the era as Jacobean.  And that allowed him to get at the underlying ugliness of the period in a highly aestheticized way.  He had already created several unique films steeped in his own peculiar vision of cinema—most notably The Draftsman’s Contract (1982) and Drowning by Numbers (1988), and including the extremely off-beat A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)—but with this, his sixth feature film, he got closer to the world we know from other movies, with gangsters and criminals high on our list of villains and anti-heroes. Greenaway’s version of this familiar figure is The Thief, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), a rude thug, an uncouth kingpin, whose distinguishing characteristic, apart from a sadism derived from the Kray Brothers (or Doug and Dinsdale Piranha), is what he considers to be a discerning palate. He will only dine in the restaurant he owns, where he holds court as a minor tyrant—giving us a glimpse of the style of the many tyrants, major and minor, with which the time was rife.

As Albert, Michael Gambon is simply amazing. As one of those character actors who never gives a bad performance, he’s truly at his best when given a role with some meat to it, as it were. He is such an appalling bully—we first meet him smearing feces all over the face and naked body of someone who dared to cross him—that he takes your breath away. You wonder how anyone—least of all yourself in watching the film—can stand to be in his company. Most of those who can tolerate him are even more jaded and unprincipled than he is—such as his somewhat cretinous henchman Mitchel (a laconic Tim Roth) or another thug played by punk rocker Ian Dury. The exception is His Wife, Georgiana—or as Albert would have it, Georgie—who, despite some comments Albert lets drop about her depraved past, seems, as played with aggrieved patience by the exquisite Helen Mirren in middle-age, quite discriminating and tactful. 

Whatever her past was, she’s clearly now a captive audience to the powerful man whose attachment to her defines her life. Soon, Georgiana is absenting herself from wallowing at Albert’s table for longer and longer periods for the sake of dalliances with Her Lover, a book-trader named Michael (Alan Howard), who, from a nearby table, has engaged her in the silent rapprochement of meaningful glances. Indeed, Michael does not speak for the first 50 minutes of the movie, creating a passionate pas de deux between the lovers. Their trysts begin in the antiseptic whiteness of the ladies’ room and soon extend to storage lockers in the restaurant’s expansive kitchen, lorded over by The Cook (Richard Bohringer), a Frenchman who aids and abets them, while trying to please Albert’s jaded tastes with his culinary arts.

Every frame of this film is a tableaux that can, for compositional brilliance, rival any works of the Golden Age of Flemish painting—indeed a great example of the portraiture of the period by Franz Hals adorns the back wall of the restaurant, and Albert and his men at times wear the sashes of the period. Greenaway’s film is as contemporary as the best avant-garde with a foot in the past, exulting in theatricality, detailed excess, and virtuoso tracking-shots. All of Greenaway’s films are highly stylized and entertaining in their somewhat labyrinthine interworking of details and cross-references, but CTHWHL commands a special place in his work in large part because of Michael Nyman’s score and the way Sacha Vierny’s camerawork interacts with it. 

Certainly, there are the visual pleasures Greenaway is so adept at constructing—such as color-coding the sets: the bathroom, the dining area, the kitchen, the car park outside the restaurant, the book depository; as well as creating a series of spaces of still-life-like density for the trysts of Georgiana and Michael, featuring nudity as one finds it in Biblical allegories of the fall from Eden or a Boschian inferno. But it’s Nyman’s score, incorporating his composition called Memorial that provides much of the emotional tone and resonance of the film—particularly in brief arias sung by the boy soprano who is a dishwasher in the kitchen as well as the liaison between Richard in the restaurant and the lovers, once the latter have taken refuge in Michael's book sanctuary.

The sense of drama here is operatic, and operates in a world entirely artificial, but constructed with an art that simply beggars most conceptions of film as primarily a visual medium, and, for all that, Greenaway shows that his grasp of cinema is thoroughly theatrical as well—a space where betrayal becomes the road to salvation like a sweet shower after a ride in a truck full of offal. Michael is murdered, stuffed with books, a metaphor for the bodily component of even the most spiritual appetite, but also a grim joke, Jacobean in its ostentatious grotesquerie. The entire film is like that, making us react to the extremes of taste, and ending with a last supper utterly inedible, yet superb in its poetic justice.  In the Eighties, only Lynch and Greenaway come close to the idiosyncratic originality of a Fellini or a Buñuel or a Resnais (fitting, since Vierny was the cinematographer on Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad), where thematics dictate the film’s method, and, here, method becomes the message.

Like any allegory, CTHWHL alters with different readings, different viewings. Its pleasures are not only its visual qualities, but the feeling of intellectual challenge: we know we aren't watching a typical film and so have to acclimate ourselves to its Baroque worldview. I admire the film for all the same reasons I admire other Greenaway films, but this film interacts more fully than his others with its period and more meaningfully with an existing genre. And it has as deliberate a meeting of music and image as in the best work of Kubrick or Lynch, and such sublime music!

 

50 Since 1970