Bill Murray does warmth in his most consistently effective post-Stripes comedy,
a romantic fantasy about a wacky weatherman forced to relive one strange day
over and over again, until he gets it right. Snowed in during a road-trip expedition
to watch the famous groundhog encounter his shadow, Murray falls into a time
warp that is never explained but pays off so richly that it doesn't need to be. The
elaborate loop-the-loop plot structure cooked up by screenwriter Danny Rubin is
crystal-clear every step of the way, but it's Murray's world-class reactive timing
that makes the jokes explode, and we end up looking forward to each new
variation. He squeezes all the available juice out of every scene. Without forcing
the issue, he makes us understand why this fly-away personality responds so
intensely to the radiant sanity of the TV producer played by Andie MacDowell.
The blissfully clueless Chris Elliott (Cabin Boy) is Murray's nudnik cameraman.
