Groundhog Day Sparknotes

The movie Groundhog Day tells a great tale about an arrogant, self-centered weather forecaster named Phil who has to be exiled from normal life so he can discover that he is in exile with himself.

On February 1, Phil and his television crew travel to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania where he is to cover the yearly ritual of the coming out of groundhog. He doesn’t like Punxsutawney so the following morning, he does his story and then gets his team on the road back to Pittsburg. On his way back, he discovers he is stuck in Punxsutawney for another night because of a blizzard that closes down travel.

Phil wakes up the next morning in his guest house to find that he is reliving the day before all over again. Everything that happened to him that previous day – the man trying to start a conversation at the top of the stairs, the old high school acquaintance recognizing him on the street, the ritual of Groundhog Day – it all occurs again. No one but Phil is aware of the time loop. At the beginning he is confused, but later on starts to take advantage of the situation. He starts to treat life as a game, he learns the town’s citizen’s secrets, seduces women, drives carelessly, and gets thrown in jail. However, his strive to get closer to Rita continuously fails.

Eventually, his unhappiness heightens so he spends the days trying to commit suicide.

He kidnaps the groundhog and drives off into a quarry; he takes a plugged-in toaster into the shower; and he jumps off a building. However, Phil wakes up the following mornings to find that he is still alive and

well.
In desperation, Phil explains the situation to Rita, who spends the whole day with him and into the early morning hours. Once again, he wakes up still stuck in the time loop. He finally figures out that he needs to improve himself. He begins to help as many people as he can around town, and also uses the time to learn how to play the piano, how to ice sculpt, and how to speak French.
Slowly, he begins to transform from an arrogant man who only cared about himself to the town’s finest hero. Rita finally falls in love with the good person he turned into so she spends the night. They wake up the next morning and she is still there the next day and the time loop has officially been broken.
The moral of the story is when we get beyond denial and dissatisfaction over the circumstances of life and death, and accept our condition, it tells us, then life is no longer a problem and we can become compassionate.