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

OLD TIMES 2: Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" at Film Forum

The second feature we saw at Film Forum Sunday was an old favorite, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960).  Me and that film go way back.  The first time I saw it was on a ten-inch black and white television, broadcast on the local PBS station in the mid-Seventies.  Even under those conditions it made an indelible impression.  I’d never before seen such controlled composition of shots.

For many, the film is the quintessential art-house film.  It’s slow-moving, it’s subtitled, it’s vague and a bit elliptical, it’s got plenty of upper-class ennui and little uncomfortable brushes with the masses, it’s got an arch attitude toward the people it portrays while all the while not denying its perspective is “of” them and “for” them.  And it’s Italian rather than French.  The French auteurs were the ones with radical ideas and a counter-intuitive fondness for Hollywood genre films.  The Italians created a different kind of film vocabulary without deliberate ideological significance, much as Japan did.  In other words, cinema was a significant industry in both countries, both defeated in World War II and both achieving mastery of this most modern of arts in the post-war period.  The reception of films by the likes of Antonioni and Kurosawa, of Fellini and Ozu, I suspect, had much to do with their ability to play to the humanism that was already fading in the glitzier productions coming from the US and UK.  To the victors go the spoils?  Yes, and the irony.

L’Avventura doesn’t exactly wear its heart on its sleeve, but the sense that some kind of emotional connection is what we most desire is a given.  We can tell that Anna (Lea Massari) is discontented from the start—she’s snippy with her partician patriarch of a dad, she’s blasé with her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti, in the role that made her name), and vaguely disgruntled with her well-meaning hunk of a boyfriend, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti).  The trio is off on a jaunt on a yacht with some slightly older Meditteranean types—one couple combines a rather imperious woman with a dogged male admirer, the other, a somewhat ditzy dame, Giulia, and her sarcastic older male partner, Corrado. 

Anna seems determined to break through her boredom.  First, there’s her precipitate plunge into the water from the fast-moving boat, then there’s her cry that she’s seen a shark—while most of the party is in the water—then she admits to Claudia that there was no shark, and then—on a visit to a small rocky island and after words of disgruntlement with Sandro—no Anna.  Where did she go?  No one knows.  Could she be hiding?  Was there a boat no one saw that she hitched a ride on?  Did she plunge to her death off a cliff?

We could say that Anna’s disappearance is the film’s “red herring.”  It poses a question that is never answered and if viewers expect that issue to be resolved, they will be disappointed.  I can’t say anything about that because before I ever saw the film I already knew that that wasn’t the point.  The film introduces Anna only to get her out of the way.  She is the means by which Claudia and Sandro become lovers, and that’s fairly ingenious, as such things go.  Claudia doesn’t get him after a break between Anna and Sandro, nor after the definite death of Anna, nor even in the absence of Anna, in the sense of when the cat’s away….  No, Anna is there and not there.  She’s the reason Claudia and Sandro are together, as they travel up the coast, following up on rumored sightings of Anna.

Into the somewhat aimless lives of these people comes a sense of mystery.  Is Anna leading them on?  Is Anna simply a pretext?  The dissatisfaction with Sandro that we saw in Anna might end up passing to her friend, but for now, Anna has provided them—in absentia—an opportunity to discover if there was a real romance simmering all along.  The film creates a situation in which the possibility of a second romance within a triangle gets to be explored.  Key to that theme are the different responses of Claudia and Sandro to Anna’s disappearance.  The latter wastes no time coming on to Claudia—the very morning after the night spent on the island in hopes Anna will appear, he attempts to kiss her.  It is as if, by choosing to remain with Sandro and Corrado, Claudia has become Anna’s replacement, for Sandro.  When he follows her onto a train, it becomes clear that his “search” for Anna is really a pursuit of Claudia.

Claudia, in a performance of great subtlety by Vitti, is very clearly content to be “second banana” to Anna.  Anna is the capricious one, the well-to-do one, the one who lends her clothes and maybe even her boyfriend, if the mood struck her. 

Claudia is more beautiful but she seems not to realize it, in part because she is herself an observer.  Two scenes are set-up to establish this.  In the first, a beautiful young girl with a tear in her dress nearly sparks a riot among cruising males who seem to see her state as an unavoidable provocation.  The girl, Gloria Perkins, is an aspiring actress and so it could all be a publicity stunt.  Later, Claudia waits outside a hotel where Anna may be staying while Sandro goes inside to investigate.  Claudia is “scoped” relentlessly by every man on the street, as they begin to gather like flies.  The amusement of Gloria is set against the distress of Claudia.  At the same time, the message that she too could have “any man” shows not only the fascination with blondes in this culture but the degree to which Sandro, in switching from Anna to Claudia, is doing what “anyone” would do, in his position.

Antonioni toys with this notion by having Claudia wear a blouse belonging to Anna, by having Claudia present when a young pseudo-artistic prince comes on to Giulia, claiming he prefers her to Claudia, and when he has Claudia don a black wig.  In each instance, the film manages to convey Claudia’s perspective.  She is self-conscious each time.  She never aspires to be a femme fatale, or even Sandro’s lover.  She only becomes the latter, we realize, by falling in love with him.  The scene on the rooftop ringing the bells presents her rare unself-conscious enjoyment of a moment—after she has finally accepted Sandro as her lover in the fields outside Noto—subsequently become ecstatic the morning after they sleep together.  Vitti enacts the joy of a woman in love with playful abandon and Sandro seems like a rather tiresome stiff in comparison.

Alone, Sandro does things like spoil a stranger’s architectural drawing (Sandro is a frustrated architect) and eventually, at a party that Claudia chooses not to attend, is spotted by Gloria Perkins, who makes a deliberate effort to get his attention as a desirable solo male.  They spend the night on a couch, only to be discovered there, still engaged with one another, by Claudia.  The final sequence of the film is rightly famous as a wordless stretch of time in which the two move toward rapprochement, Antonioni’s sense of space and composition acting as silent commentary.

That element of the film has been present all along—for instance with the shot framing Claudia below through a window while we are with Sandro and Anna in his bedroom, or with the figures against the barren island, or with the placing of Sandro and Anna against rock and water.  The use of walls and voids creates a visual texture that comes to have a rigor we grasp as the point of view of the film.  We see not only people in space and in groups and against backgrounds—as in any film—but we see them as figures in compositions, their actions and passions contained by a sense of artistry that, rather than intruding or distracting, provides meaning.  How things look is inseparable from how things feel.  Antonioni’s assertion is that only cinema allows us fully to register this aspect of existence. And this is a film to see that proven.

Viewing it this time, after The Servant, I was conscious of the fact that humor was rather lacking—that irony I spoke of earlier—and that the print was nowhere near as pristine as the one we’d been treated to of Losey’s film.  I believe my copy of the Criterion DVD is sharper, but one thing that came across to me more than before was the score.  The music adds odd commentary to the visuals, often feeling oppressive, or building in ways that suggest discomfort or anxiousness.  There’s a brooding quality that adds a certain solemnity to it all, but that also deadens any sense that the characters have any independence from the terms in which they are presented.  L’Avventura presents a formal and rigorous artistry that surrounds human impermanence with a sense of austere beauty, and finds in Monica Vitti a figure whose expressive resources add a subjective contrast to the sense of detachment.  The film never fails to fascinate me.

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