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Groundhog Day: Musical vs. Movie

So why do I say Groundhog Day the musical is better than the movie?

Groundhog Day the movie is a fairly straight comedy. There is an element of existential horror to the premise, but it’s pretty much entirely played for laughs. Phil accepts the bizarre situation he’s in without much fuss aside from comical confusion and annoyance. There is, yes, the suicide montage (the most memorable part of the movie by far for me, because I am me). But it’s kicked off by the absurd, hilarious sequence where Phil kidnaps the groundhog, steals a car and then dramatically drives it off a cliff. “He might be okay,” Larry comments before the car explodes, then, “Well, no, probably not now.” Definitely played for laughs, and while the following montage isn’t comical in the same way until after the end (“I really, really liked him. A lot.”), it’s too short to actually whip back from comedy to any kind of serious emotional impact.

Meanwhile, the premise of Groundhog Day interestingly invites the viewer to consider how the people around them are also people living their own lives, whose lives might be positively or negatively impacted by one’s own actions - Phil gets to know the life story of practically everyone in Punxsutawney, and eventually his character growth comes in the form of deciding to be a positive force in the lives of all these people - at least for this one day. But it is a bit of a shame that despite this premise, the supporting characters in the movie are pretty one-note and not very fleshed out - Rita gets to be a real, developed person who reacts to Phil in organic and fairly believable ways, but characters like Ned Ryerson are just standard exaggerated comedy people, who we get to see being exaggerated comedy people in a few different variations. It’s hard to truly get a sense that Phil has come to care about these people, because the movie doesn’t make them seem like actual people, just obstacles in his path that he eventually learns his way around. (Or, if you appreciate video game analogies, they are pretty much just NPCs with little sidequests that he’s learned to speedrun). As a result, I actually find his character development less convincing than it could be - there are really good moments that strengthen it (when he realizes on the day that he’s honest with Rita about what’s happening that she’s an infinitely better person than he is, and when he tries to save the homeless man), but the actual bit with him trying to help everyone in town falls flat in comparison, becomes a mere comedy routine rather than giving a real sense that he’s changed as a person.

The thing about the musical, then, is that it takes the premise a lot more seriously than the movie ever did. Phil’s suicidal despair is actually dwelt on a bit and gets a pretty serious song exploring his tortured mental state as he tries to kill himself repeatedly, and his first suicide attempt involves him shooting the groundhog and himself with a gun, which is a lot less comical than the version in the movie. And the second act goes to pains to spotlight two of the supporting characters (Nancy and Ned) as real people with their own rich inner lives, not simply props in Phil’s personal universe, which makes it a lot more genuine and rewarding when Phil starts to truly treat them that way. Though they could perhaps have done even more in that department, I really dig that.

And even aside from taking it more seriously, the musical just handles the character arc better. Overall it is very, very similar to the movie - it hits basically exactly all the same plot beats and scenes and most of the exact same jokes, even, with the circumstances of Phil’s first suicide being probably the biggest deviation. But the movie made some missteps in conveying Phil’s ultimate redemption, and they’re by and large all corrected in the musical.

In the movie, Phil humours Ned by buying a bunch of life insurance off him; that really feels like fake, performative niceness, just saying whatever he wants to hear to make him happy, like a video game protagonist doing a 100% run instead of like how an actual compassionate human being behaves. In the musical, Phil learns his wife died and cares, apologizes for punching him and walks with him to get coffee, like a real person, and it’s so much more genuine. In the movie, Phil paid the piano teacher to kick out the kid she was teaching and teach him instead; that’s a real jackass move, and it felt really wrong for him to be doing that every day now that he was supposed to be in the process of developing into a decent human. In the musical, that bit has wisely been removed, and the piano teacher presumably just had an opening (and he’s also just generally thoughtful towards her, which is nice). And the bit in the movie with him making an ice sculpture of Rita on the final day and talking about how he knew every detail of her face was just kind of creepy and stalkerish and felt uncomfortably similar to his previous attempts to artificially impress her by speaking French, etc.; in the musical, his dejected declarations that he knows everything about Rita in “Everything About You” end up being challenged and turned on their head in “Seeing You”:

And I know now that I know
I know now that I know nothing.

Completing his character development now means also shedding the arrogance of believing he knows everything there is to know about Rita, or anyone else, just because he can list off facts about them - accepting that they’re people and not puzzles to solve. Good! That’s so much better and so much more genuinely likable. In the musical it actually doesn’t feel like he’s going out of his way to impress Rita on the final day at all - just like he’s generally thoughtful towards her like he is towards everyone now, and she grows to like him on her own terms because of that.

And it also feels better conveyed in the musical how and why his redemption happens. In the musical it’s very clear and coherent how having some actual, sincere, friendly human interaction with Rita pulls him out of a deep, unfeeling depression and how her take on his situation - how he’s lucky to get to try new things every day and can do so much good with this, while it’s everyone else who is stuck as time continually pulls the rug out from under them - inspires him to start to see it in a new light, really start to see everyone else as human beings and want to treat them kindly and positively. It didn’t feel as strongly satisfying and believable in the movie.

So, all in all, it shows that the book of the musical was written by Danny Rubin, the original screenwriter of the film: he knew to keep what we loved about the original film, but had identified some of the faults in it since and worked to rectify them. Whatever you think of musical adaptations generally, Groundhog Day is an exceptional one that takes a good story and keeps its essence intact while making it stronger on several levels, and that's what a good adaptation is.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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