It’s no spoiler to say that Palm Springs, Hulu’s new Andy Samberg movie, takes its cue from Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day—the 1993 classic in which a befuddled weatherman played by Bill Murray relived the same day over and over and, conveniently enough for the romantics among us, fell in love with Andie Macdowell in the process. It was a clever gimmick. The will-they/won’t-they back-and-forth of movie romances has all the makings of emotional purgatory anyway; Groundhog Day was simply smart and silly enough to literalize it, and liberated enough to fashion the rom com genre into one man’s comically unending hell.
This is not exactly the sort of gimmick one references discreetly—a borrowed shot, a winking needle drop, any of the other annoying ways writers and directors try to render their movies into veritable film school syllabi. No, Groundhog Day is a pretty recognizable strand of DNA, and a good enough movie to more or less obviate the need for copycats. A few recent efforts—Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Netflix’s Russian Doll—have proven worthwhile stepchildren nonetheless.
Palm Springs, on the other hand, takes after its hero, Nyles (Samberg): it’s more or less coasting. Nyles is a 30-something in Hawaiian shirt whose career or station in life I couldn’t really tell you because, in one semi-interesting swerve from the Ramis blueprint, he’s forgotten them. When the movie starts, Nyles is already far into the time-loop that’s become his life. He’s adjusted. He’s died many times. He’s even made an enemy, a guy named Roy whose role in the story I shouldn’t reveal, but whose casting—J. K. Simmons—more or less sums it up.
The day Nyles is fated to relive in perpetuity is a wedding day: that of Tala (Camila Mendes) and Abe (Tyler Hoechlin), friends of Nyles’s girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner), who opens the movie by complaining about how much Nyles sweats on her during sex. A happily unhappy couple, in other words. It isn’t until the movie gets a little bit of a Rachel Getting Married vibe, by way of Cristin Milioti, that things get interesting. Miloti plays the troubled sister of the bride-to-be, a woman prone to making mistakes, you could say—among them falling for Nyles at her sister’s wedding.
But about that time loop. Max Barbakow, who directed the movie, and Andy Siara, who wrote it, do their best to differentiate Palm Springs from its movie cousins and giving it the mock-chill vibe Samberg has spent his career perfecting. Sometimes it works; the movie is an easy watch. But Palm Springs also keeps getting in its own way, with a premise whose complications demand more explanation than anyone really wants from an Andy Samberg movie, and a romance that at times feels about as adult as a tenth grader. You start to notice that a lot of the real mischief—a lot of the real fun—is relegated to get-to-know-you montages between Sarah and Nyles, with the occasional heartfelt confession between them forced to overstate the obvious.
It would have been fun to see the movie dwell in the sincere discomfort that this situation very quickly and handily dredges up. Most of the people in Palm Springs seem like closet lunatics, which is very much to its credit—though the movie doesn’t always seem to know it. Discomfort isn’t the vibe, man; we’re just here, stuck in a Hollywood time loop, fated to watch another round of hot cynics saving their souls. What is the premise of Groundhog Day, after all, if not a readymade character-development machine? The original earns its charm in no small part thanks to Bill Murray playing the sourpuss. But it’s also no wonder so many screenwriters have borrowed from the movie: it is a handsome feat of engineering. The day doesn’t change, so the central characters must. Well, if they must…
Palm Springs is fine. But there are glimmers of something weird and interesting in this movie that made me crave a ballsier—funnier—endgame. Something about that whiz-bang montage of Nyles dying over and over, or those slight references Sarah makes to her past, make the movie feel like a rom-com hero: on the verge of missing out on every opportunity fate’s thrown its way. Palm Springs endeared me to Samberg and Milioti quite a bit, and that’s not nothing. The movie, though, doesn’t amount to much.
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