Depends on the person. Phil seems like the kind of guy who would have memorised actions down to the second by the end of the first month, at least in one small section of town for a short period of time. On the other hand, I think it would take me the better part of a year before I started timing events and working out what time everything happens. I would be less observant than he is. In fact, I could probably go a year without noticing one major thing that he picked up on in the first day! He’s a newsman, he’s used to watching out for things to report on, getting the timing right, that sort of thing.
I have never really considered how long he was there, but I guess it would have been a year or two… learning to play that song, getting to know the townsfolk, all the different things he did would take time, especially since everybody who knows him thinks they met him for the first time sometime that day.
I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve seen this movie, and I get the impression of huge amounts of times - definitely decades, perhaps centuries.
I’m only dragging this old thread up because I just saw the movie again and was doing a search about it here but according to the IMDB’s trivia page on the movie:
Now it doesn’t give a source or any substantiation for it but I thought it might be of interest.
I remember that one of the links in IMDB led to a website that gave a detailed exposé on the number of visible days in the movie, and said it totaled to the exact number of days/weeks that winter would last according to the groundhog. I didn’t check it at the time. Can’t search for the website at present, maybe I’lll get around to it later.
I am still bothered about the leaving town thing. He tried to leave town, but was stopped because of the closed roads, due to the snowstorm. But wasn’t this later in the day? Why couldn’t he high tail it out of town as soon as he got up a 6:00AM? And if he does get out of town, what happens then? Say he gets out of town, drives to Philly, and catches a plane to London, all in the same day. What happens at 6:00AM the next day? Will he wake up in “Punxsutawney Hell” again?
I dunno why, but these questions have always nagged at me.
This movie could have been a series, like Quantum Leap. There are so many possibilities and problems that I can’t imagine the struggle to keep it to movie length.
According to the “rules” of the movie, if he left town, he would end up in bed at 6:00 AM just like always. I’m willing to believe that if death doesn’t stop that, travel doesn’t either.
I know that if I was in this situation, I would spend many many days just testing the conundrum I was in. How far can I drive, what if I stay in bed all day, what if I take stimulants, etc. I like to think that he did all of these things, we just didn’t see it.
But wait! I just remembered something! Are you sure the town itself doesn’t have any influence over Mr. Murray’s character experiencing “Punxsutawney Hell” (as I like to call it)?
Every time he died he was in town right? He never did make it out of town. Can we be sure that if he indeed did make it out of town, and stayed out of town until 6:00AM the next day, that the “Punxsutawney Hell” spell would not be broken? Food for thought.
I know I am being silly here, but play along with me for a bit.
See, this is what I mean! Trying to get out of town is the logical thing to do, after a fashion, so that makes me sure that he tried it a few times. However, we only see him try it that once, late in the day, when it’s already snowing.
My guess is that the time constraints of the movie left us with the one scene of him trying to leave, but I don’t know if that satisfies me completely. I wonder if the point was that Rita was keeping him in town. That Whatever or Whoever was manipulating his life had decided that she was what he needed, and he was going to wake up every day at 6AM in Punxatawney until they GOT! IT! ON!
Apparently, according to the new DVD comentary (which I haven’t heard but read about on the IMDB boards), the original screenplay was written with the figure ten thousand years in mind. Harold Ramis also commented on some TBS presentation of the movie that Phil spent some ten thousand days in Punxatawney. That second number seems reasonable.
Actually, they never get it on in the movie. On the morning when his life advances to 3 February, as he realises that things are different he starts kissing her and she says that she wishes he was like that last night since just fell asleep and he says it was the end of a very long day.
Ok, I’m a pedant but two things about the notion that “getting it on” was the solution for advancing to Feb 3:
He kissed her many times before when he was trying to seduce her and that never advanced the date.
She makes it clear that they didn’t do anything much (in the intimate sense) the night before.
My Deepish opinion
I prefer to believe that the movie is about salvation and while the selfish, egocentric Phil Connors continues to use the day for selfish means, he is doomed to repeat it. It is only once he discovers that he can use his situation for the good of others that he is saved from his predicament and Rita comes to love him.
Phil: It’s the same things your whole life. “Clean up your room!”, “Stand up straight!”, “Pick up your feet!”, “Take it like a man!”, “Be nice to your sister!”, “Don’t mix beer and wine, ever!”. Oh yeah, “Don’t drive on the railroad track!”
[turns car onto the railroad tracks]
Gus: Eh, Phil. That’s one I happen to agree with.
I’m in the ‘Thousands of Years’ camp. Punxsutawney has almost 7000 people, I’m sure to be as familiar with everybody in the town as he was he spent at LEAST several days devoted to getting to know each one. His skill at the piano would take decades considering he was limited in how many lessons he could take in a day, and that he seemed to be a much better pianist than he could have become learning from one small town piano teacher alone. Considering how much he helped some people, I’m sure there were plenty more in a town that size that he probably came to know well enough that he felt obligated to do something to make them feel better each day, that probably ate up a huge amount of his time, ‘making the rounds’. Still, when I add it up, the time I figure necessary is still thousands of years, probably not more than a couple of hundred - but I don’t think he spent every day studying to become omniscient god of Punxsutawney. He probably spent decades just goofing off, or trying to bed every woman in town, then trying to see how many combinations of women he could bed simultaneously. He probably read every book he could find to see if there was any mention, anywhere, of a phenomenon like this. He may have spent time watching the news and trying to prevent tragedies by telephone (read about a fatal car accident, research the names of those involved, call them and tell them not to leave the house that day) - I find it hard to believe he would have limited his attempts to make the world better to just the one town.
I think he could have learned everything he did in a couple of centuries, but considering human nature and how familiar he was with everything, down to the second, I feel he would have had to spend thousands of years there. One could read a library full of books describing in detail the lives of 7000 people in a few decades, perhaps, but to memorize that much information would take a lot longer. I think to have such a godlike understanding of his world he would have had to spend an inhuman amount of time there.
I don’t see how it could have been thousands or even hundreds of years, DVD commentary be damned.
Here’s why:
Phil Connors was still basically a normal guy by the end of the movie. Don’t you think that even a couple of decades of this crap would pervert someone utterly?
Think about how he would begin to relate to people. It would all become a horrible dream. All sense of reality would vanish. He might start attacking or murdering people on sight because he knew there would be no consequences. He might make a habit of doing any number of heinous or outrageous things once he lost his grip on reality. Just look what happened to Gollum.
However, the movie gives us the impression that he’s always aware that reality is still out there somewhere, and that once he progresses to February 3, he continues on to live a normal life of being exceptionally nice to people, and none the worse because of his experience.
Are we expected to believe that he returns to normal, functioning society after 20,000 years of complete perversion?? I don’t think so.
