Groundhog Day.

February is the twenty-eight-day desert of the calendar. (Leap year makes matters one day worse.) It is a drag and one may say that in the great scheme of things it functions splendidly, precisely by being a drag. After the four-punch holiday k.o. of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, February gives us the boredom we need to recover, time enough to become blase so that spring and Easter can wake us up. Valentine's Day is but a holiday for kids and Hallmark, and now that the Lincoln and Washington birthdays have been lumped together as Presidents' Day, they have lost what little distinctiveness they ever possessed as festivals. February is the season of non-celebration, of colorlessness, of stasis.

Who would ever want to make a comedy about February? Groundhog Day is a movie about February, about the feeling of February, its lassitude and seeming unchangeability. And Groundhog Day is joyful. It is a piece of nonsense that may haunt you; it's a bauble made of silver, if not of gold.

Its hero, Phil Connors, is a Scrooge figure but he's only a Scrooge for February. He doesn't foreclose mortgages or persecute widows and orphans. He's not tightfisted or grasping. He just doesn't care about anyone or anything except the advancement of his career as a TV personality. Connors happens to be a local news weatherman but would serve just as happily as an anchor or talk-show host, his adaptability being a feature of his noncommitted nature. Phil's march (or saunter, really) through the world of infotainment is merely a way of passing the time of his life instead of living it.

Bill Murray plays this jaded man by using, though modifying, his familiar persona, the hipster who verbally skewers all the bores and dopes around him. Murray's usual devices niftily define Connors: the frozen mask of boredom betrayed only by the shifty eyes which focus on people just long enough to dismiss them; the glibly friendly voice that drops into inaudibility so that Connors can insult people to their faces without their being quite aware of it. And then there are the elaborately grudging gestures. When Murray splashes cold water on his face in the morning, we can see how he despises contact with a natural element, how he hates every bracing drop. When he asks his landlady at his modest bed-and-breakfast for a cappuccino, clearly he doesn't expect her to have the makings; he's just creating a situation in which she'll realize her unworthiness to have him as her paying guest. If Erich von Stroheim was the Man You Love to Hate, Bill Murray is the man we love to love while he's being hateful.

But this time Murray weights his tricks with a measure of not-so-comic rancor. In Ghostbusters, Stripes, and other Murray vehicles, this actor was our smartass proxy, and we cheered him for lancing pomposity and nerdiness. But in Groundhog Day, Phil Connors, like Scrooge (another Murray role), must be reformed.

A reformation takes the shape of Punxsutawney, Pa., where Phil, covering Groundhog Day celebration as a "color" story, is trapped by a blizzard whose very existence is an insult since he predicted it wouldn't happen. Furthermore, it keeps him in a town which seems to be the capital of Nerdity.

But that's not all. Some supernatural power has decreed that Phil will wake up in this town every morning of his life and it will always be February 2, Groundhog Day. He will have to reencounter the same bores and ineptitudes until...until Phil Connors Gets It Right. That is, until he both appreciates and improves Punxsutawney, his life will be literally unchangeable.

So this is It's a Wonderful Life in reverse. Instead of James Stewart learning to accept his past just as it is, we have Bill Murray learning that he won't have a future until he performs so virtuously that February 3 can finally dawn. Here is a man for whom each day is nothing but a rough draft.

Connors goes through four stages that are equally hilarious and are all acted to the hilt by Murray. First is the realization period in which Phil simply tries to understand what's happening. In this sequence the mere novelty and fantasy of the situation get laughs. But when Phil realizes that nothing he does is irrevocable and that all will be erased by 6 A.M., the movie turns into a sort of Middle-American Faust and Murray shifts into high gear, stuffing himself with massive amounts of high-cholesterol food, driving recklessly, and gathering information about beautiful women which he will use the next day to pick them up.

Small-town Faust becomes a farcical No Exit when Phil, despairing of ever escaping from his custom-made limbo, hurls himself off buildings and in front of speeding cars, only to wake up unscathed in his bed-and-breakfast to the strains of Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You, Babe" on his clock-radio. Finally, partly under the good influence of his first true love, played by Andie MacDowell with a directness that keeps her character from being smarmy, and partly out of sheer desperation, the heel becomes a hero to the town's citizens. And this last section, which might have been phonily poignant, stays dry and humorous as Connors turns into a schedule-driven, harassed Good Samaritan racing to keep his appointments with children falling out of trees and restaurant patrons in need of the Heimlich maneuver.

The brilliantly structured plot keeps Groundhog Day both taut and varied, but other elements contribute to its fun.

In this movie, economy of storytelling and filmmaking isn't merely of aid to comedy, it is sometimes the very source of humor. For instance, when the director Harold Ramis cuts from Phil making a faux pas in his seduction of MacDowell on one day to his slick moves on the very next, we laugh at the instant erasure of amorous ineptitude. If Ramis had inserted any transitional shot of Phil pondering his next step, the comedy would have been ruined.

Some of the humor derives entirely from Murray's performance. In an early attempt on MacDowell's virtue, Phil successfully feigns boyish ebullience while building a snowman and exchanging volleys of snowballs with local urchins. But when Phil, forced to reenact this scene, merely goes through the motions, shouting too enthusiastically and grinning too maniacally, like a bored actor trotting through the script of a long-running play, the young woman feels repelled and Connors loses again. It is Murray's acting alone that shows exactly what goes wrong since the two scenes are, of course, identically written.

Groundhog Day is a companionable movie and a rarity: a comedy done with a throwaway lightness of touch that your memory won't throw away.