Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies, and (like Bronco) I’ve seen it over a hundred times. Okay, maybe just a dozen or two. However, there is a wonderful detail I never noticed until recently. I’m probably the last person to spot it, but I’m going to share it anyway because I think it’s too great not to share.

The Boy in the Tree

If anyone is unfamiliar, Groundhog Day is about a selfish weatherman named Phil Connors who reports on the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Through a twist of fate, he gets trapped there and is forced to repeat that same day over and over until he finally changes for the better and helps everyone around him have the best day ever.

Near the end of the film, right after his early-morning broadcast on his last day, Phil rushes down the street to catch a young boy in a red coat with a blue stripe who slips and falls out of a tree. Have you ever wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t been there to catch the boy? Or how Phil even knew to save him at all?

It turns out that both of those questions are answered in the hospital scene where Phil learns that the old homeless man has died.

I had always been so wrapped up in the emotion of that scene that I never noticed that there is even more going on in the background. While Phil is pacing back and forth, and then the doctor tells him that the old man just passed away, we see a boy dressed in a red coat with a blue stripe with (presumably) his mother being addressed by a nurse. The boy is in a wheelchair, and one of his legs is in a cast.

My Surmising

This is purely my own speculation to fill in the gaps, but it seems warranted. Phil must have noticed that poor boy and questioned him about his accident on his way out of the hospital. Then he would have spent a morning looking for the boy and seeing exactly when and where his fall out of a tree took place. When he realized that it was right after his newscast, he decided to take matters into his own hands, literally. He rushed over to spare the boy a broken leg every day, even though he never received any thanks in return.

The old, selfish Phil would have snickered at the boy’s bad luck, just like he did with the unlucky pedestrian who stepped in a giant puddle of freezing water. But the transformed Phil is eager to relieve suffering in every way he can. He doesn’t even need to receive credit for his noble action to keep doing it.

Hinting at Something Big

The thing I like most about Groundhog Day is how understated it is about everything. In one scene, Phil briefly glances at some beautiful ice sculptures on his way home after a sad evening. Many scenes later, he’s suddenly a master ice sculptor himself. And he downplays his ability, even though he’s a savant!

That small detail hints at something big. He must have spent months perfecting his craft to get to that level of artistry. And he does that in so many areas of life, it’s hard to count. Learning to play the piano, perform the Heimlich maneuver, fix bad backs, and countless other skills serve him well when it comes to becoming the best man he can be. And we barely get a hint that he’s spending a thousand lifetimes doing all those things.

Perhaps Phil’s many brushes with death, and his inability to save the life of the old, forgotten homeless man, were what gave him the push he needed to ask the boy in the hospital what happened to him to end up in a cast. Maybe he even made a joke about it, noting that he makes forecasts for a living, so he could spare one cast for each of the boy’s limbs.

Whatever the case, now that you know about this subtle detail of the boy in the hospital, hopefully you’ll be able to spot it the next time you watch Groundhog Day. That movie is always worth a watch, and my hope is that this will only deepen your enjoyment of it. Feel free to let me know if you already noticed the boy in the hospital long before I did in a comment below.

This is the Deja Reviewer bidding you farewell until we meet again.

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