groundhog-day

The time loop genre deserves more entries, not fewer, and Palm Springs is the argument for why. Strip away the gimmick and you’re left with the oldest question there is: what would you actually do if consequences were suspended? Groundhog Day answered moral growth. Palm Springs answers commitment, and the particular flavour of nihilism that sets in once you’ve already tried everything else, and it turns out that’s the richer question. Samberg is restrained here, playing a man who’s been funny for so long he’s forgotten why. Milioti is the whole film.

Bill Murray is doing something precise in the early scenes: playing a man who thinks he’s too good for his surroundings. The film’s quiet argument is that Phil is wrong, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s not that Punxsutawney is secretly wonderful. It’s that contempt is a kind of blindness, and the loop forces Phil to look. David Thomson described Murray as “the obdurately sensible persona responding to orderly madness,” which is exactly right. Phil isn’t heroic. He’s competent and irritated, and the film’s engine is watching competence and irritation gradually lose to something harder to name—attention, perhaps. Care. The kind of knowledge you can only acquire through repetition. Phil’s arc from contempt to mastery to something like grace mirrors what happens when you watch anything often enough: you stop watching the plot and start watching the texture. I have seen this film perhaps fifty times. I’ll watch it again soon.