keep the talent happy
"Murray seems extremely comfortable playing an unhappy person," Chris O'Shea says in Vulture , 31 January 2013, "so it makes sense that most of the good dialogue in Groundhog Day comes when he is still being mean to people." As I mentioned yesterday, Roger Ebert, in his original review, says "Murray is funnier in the early scenes in which he is delivering sardonic weather reports and bitterly cursing the fate that brought him to Punxsutawney in the first place." By the third act, the film isn't a comedy anymore, of course, or at least not the same kind of comedy that it was before. The first act is something closer to an 80s raunchy comedy (though not particularly raunchy), the second act a straight romantic comedy (with the obvious science fiction element, of course), the third act is something... else, a poignant, humanist fairy tale (that just happens to still have some laughs). Bill Murray manages all three quite well (though perhaps the fir...