How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

with the clock radio in his room playing “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher, to face the same twenty-four hours once more.

We never find out how many February 2’s he lives through—an early draft of the script has him reading through the entire Punxsutawney public library at the rate of one page a day, though the film as released doesn’t have quite that sense of Indian epic time—but he’s there long enough to go from absolute beginner at the piano to being an accomplished-enough player to be able to get through a bit of Rachmaninoff and some credible light jazz by the end, and he doesn’t start taking piano lessons until the movie is nearly over.

Connors has the hots for his producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and since he’s the only character who remembers all the different February 2’s, he begins feeling her out for information about herself that he can use the next day to show how much they have in common. He memorizes French poetry, orders sweet vermouth (with a twist, yet) to show that he shares her tastes, asks her heartfelt questions about what she wants out of life. Connors eventually gets her back to his bed and breakfast but, after Rita tells him that she won’t sleep with him that night, unleashes his full shmuck self in a desperate attempt to score and tells Rita that he loves her. Rita, who has no recollection of the dozen or two February 2’s that have led up to this moment, looks at him as if he’d just slapped her and says, “You don’t even know me…. This whole day was just one long setup!”

Faced with an eternity of frustration, Connors gets even more depressed and tries to kill himself at various times and in various ways, sometimes with the groundhog, sometimes with somebody else, sometimes all by himself, only to wake right back up at 6 A.M. to another Groundhog Day. He tells Rita that he must be some sort of god, since he’s unkillable; he demonstrates his local omniscience for her, telling her all about the lives of the other people in the diner where they’re having this conversation, and even predicting a few minor events just before they happen. “I told you!” he tells her when she asks, yet again, how he does it. “I wake up every day right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February second and I can’t turn it off.” He fills Rita in on the details of their shared Groundhog Day past, and she proposes staying up all night with him, as a sort of “objective witness” to what’s been happening. They stay up all night, and just before six, as Rita is dozing off, Phil admits that he loves her: “I don’t deserve someone like you, but if I ever would, I swear I would love you for the rest of my life.” Rita wishes him good night.

The alarm sounds, it’s another Groundhog Day, but Phil has found his cognitive constraint—Rita, who is distracting enough to force him into accurate self-assessment—and after years’ worth of Groundhog Days he figures out Hillel’s idea for himself. He shows up for that morning’s report on Groundhog Day with coffee for Rita and the cameraman; he hears some Mozart that he likes and immediately starts taking piano lessons; he starts to look after the aged bum whom he used to walk by every day. Since it’s a small town and he’s been there for so long that he knows everything that’s going to happen, he starts to prevent bad things from happening: keeps a little girl from being run over; walks into a restaurant, goes directly to a table where he administers the Heimlich maneuver to a choking man; catches a boy as he falls out of a tree. Rita is finally won over. They spend the night together and wake up on February 3.

The turning point occurs when Phil realizes that even though he can’t get out of February 2, he can change things in such a way that he might have a chance of getting Rita to love him. All that needs to be changed is Phil, and he sets about doing so. Things move quickly past Rita, though, and Phil begins to take an active role in the lives of many of the townspeople, thanks in large part to the imaginative sympathy that is so important a part of Hillel’s idea. In view of the circumstances, there is really nothing that anybody in Punxsutawney can do for Phil. He isn’t helping them because that’s how he’d want them to treat him, he’s helping them because helping them is the right thing to do, because—corny as it sounds—being nice to all those people makes the town, which is all the world that Connors has anymore, a nicer place for everybody. In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie, Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about “doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse.” Which might not sound like very much, but it’s just about all you can do in life.

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THE PATH FROM Hillel to Phil Connors bears out yet another piece of the Talmud’s psychology, probably one of the deepest observations in all of its thirty-six tractates:

Let a person always occupy himself with Torah and good deeds, even if he isn’t doing them for their own sake; for from doing them with an ulterior motive, he will come to do them for their own sake.

(NOZIR 23B)

This, of course, is exactly what happens with Phil. He might not be studying any Torah, but he certainly occupies himself with good deeds. His initial efforts at treating others with some semblance of dignity and respect are either attempts to relieve the tedium of always