“Caustic wit”: The classic movie character Quentin Tarantino hated beyond redemption
Being an arsehole is easy, it’s giving due care to those around you and punching upwards that takes effort. Sadly, many comedians have gone with the former, cheaply tapping into our penchant for shock and individualism. For Quentin Tarantino, this facet derides a movie that has gone down as a cult classic in many circles.
The director is no stranger to loathsome characters, he’s written a fair few of them himself. But within his own projects, they fit the narrative; they are necessary evils, so to speak. However, when it comes to Groundhog Day, the Pulp Fiction director thinks that the Buddism-inspired arc was wasted on a lead who was so horrid he was beyond the redemption the movie seeks to afford him.
Bill Murray’s news reporting lead, Phil, is an unloved and unloving brute. Long before he is forced into an unending Kafkaesque loop, he cuts a cold and cynical figure. In fact, the hell he finds himself trapped in barely changes him all that much in the beginning, he just invents new ways to inflict pain and misery while just about amusing himself. The only real shift is that he starts physically assaulting people, too.
In Tarantino’s eyes, this ruins the movie—the sense of impending redemption feeling as fitting as something akin to Darth Vader: The Story of a Misunderstood Father or The Joker: How Mental Health Management Reformed Me. Writing in his book Cinema Speculation, the director revealed he wasn’t too pleased with this misstep in the 1993 film: “Admittedly, when you don’t give a fuck about other people’s feelings, it probably does wonders for your caustic wit. But I’ve always rejected the idea that Bill Murray’s characters needed redemption.”
Continuing, he adds: “Yeah, maybe he charmed Andie MacDowell, but does anybody think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray?”. I mean, there is even a hint that his romantic conquest is more aligned with sexuality or the need to break his maddening cycle more so than a meeting of minds and a desire to change.
Tarantino’s critique also hints at the problems of the man behind the character. Cinema Speculation arrived in 2022 after a few problematic stories about Murray had hit the headlines. Not giving a “fuck about other people’s feelings“ as a mere end to poke fun certainly extends beyond the fiction of Groundhog Day on this occasion. It is a cheap form of humour, unbecoming of the attempt to suddenly offer up a wholesome second act.
Tarantino argues this impact many Murray movies in that era. “If you make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last 20 minutes,” he wrote in Cinema Speculation. “Like, for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.”
In his view, he preferred his comedy a little bit lighter, but arguably with a neater philosophical arc. “The critics always really preferred Bill Murray movies to Chevy Chase movies. However, it does seem as if the point of all the Bill Murray movies is that he’s this kind of hip, cool, curmudgeon, smartass guy, who, in the last 20 minutes, gets a transformation and becomes this nice guy and almost apologises for who he was,” he says.
And he figures this is phoney. “Chevy Chase movies don’t play that shit. Chevy Chase is the same supercilious asshole at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He never changes in his stuff. He’s always like a bit of a dick. And he’s always completely sarcastic,” he concludes.
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