Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Starring: Kathleen Turner, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Jim Carrey and Sofia Coppola
Grade: C+

The first half is pretty fun, but it loses a lot of steam as the story gets deeper.

Summary

In 1985, Peggy Sue Bodell (Turner) and her daughter Beth (Hunt) get ready for Peggy Sue’s high school reunion. As Peggy gets dressed, they see her ex-husband, and father to Beth, Charlie (Cage) on a commercial, selling appliances for his store. Beth still loves her father, but Peggy hasn’t forgotten how he cheated on her with some girl named Janet. She’s bitter about him and understandably so. She’s also not so sure about going to this reunion, but Beth insists on taking her. They go, and Peggy has a pretty good time seeing all her old friends like Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), Maddy (Joan Allen), Arthur (Wil Shriner), Rosalie (Lucinda Jenney), and Carol (Catherine Hicks). As she starts to mingle once everyone stops asking her about Charlie, and we see Carol do cocaine with Walter Getz (Carrey), Peggy talks with Richard’s wife about how she used to have a crush on Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), the only guy she wishes she slept with from school (other than Charlie of course). Later, she dances with Richard, who thanks her for being one of the very few to not make fun of him in high school. It seems like everything is going well, but then Charlie arrives, completely ruining her mood. Shortly after this, the reunion committee select a king and queen. They announce Richard as king and Peggy as queen. Peggy gets extremely anxious. Everyone cheers for her as she walks up, and she tears up as they crown her. She starts to get overwhelmed at the scene. They start wheeling a cake towards the stage as she stands there.

As everyone cheers and claps to the band playing Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue”, Peggy passes out. The lights flash all these crazy colors, and Charlie and Beth run up to her to see if she’s okay, but she’s out of it.

The next thing she knows, Peggy wakes up in a bed, drawing blood at her high school. However, she wakes up in the year 1960! She’s back in her senior year of high school, seeing all of her old friends young again! She’s even immediately approached by a young Charlie, who at this time is still dating her. She’s totally freaked out!

Going back in time will do that to you.

Maddy and Carol take her home, thinking she’s just delirious from giving blood. However, she is just amazed, looking at the town and the cars through the lens of this time warp. She gets home and gets to see her mother when she was younger again and her little sister (Coppola), appreciating every bit of it. Trying to enjoy herself, or just say “Fuck it”, she has some alcohol and gets a little tipsy, just as her father comes home with a new car. She starts laughing uncontrollably when he shows the family, so he calls her out for drinking, grounds her, and has her put to bed. The next morning following reconciliation with her father, she is picked up for school by Charlie. On the way, Charlie suggests they go through with breaking up after high school is over, see other people for a while, and then eventually get married. Knowing what happens between them in the future, she tells Charlie they should break up now instead, despite prom coming up. After this, she goes through her school day and starts to really enjoy herself. She even keeps an eye on deep thinker Michael Fitzsimmons, who’s arguing with the English teacher over Ernest Hemingway. At lunch, we see Walter and Charlie discuss their band and how Charlie should tell his father he’s pursuing a career in music over his dad’s business. At the same time, Peggy and her friends join them at the table next to theirs. As everyone hangs out, Peggy sees Richard and tries to befriend the nerdy little genius. He thinks she’s trying to mess with him, but she insists they should meet after school, so he agrees. Charlie sees the two talking, and he and Walter talk about how she’s trying to make him jealous.

After school, he tries to talk with Peggy, but she spurns his advances. Next, Peggy goes to meet Richard and asks him if time travel is possible. He agrees, so Peggy tells him that she’s traveled back in time and proves it by telling him things he accomplishes in the future. Then, she tells him a bunch of other facts and convinces him to help her. Though Richard may only get her so far in terms of help, she doesn’t have anyone else to turn too. However, she doesn’t wonder too much about how to get back to the present. She takes this time as way of righting wrongs from the past, especially with Charlie, and to see if things would’ve turned out differently had she stopped seeing him.

My Thoughts:

I love this idea. Let’s do a time travel movie that sends a fully-fledged adult back to 1960, during her senior year of high school. Besides the always talked about Back to the Future, I feel like Peggy Sue Got Married might be the only other film to explore an idea like this during that doo-wop time period. I could be wrong, but that reason alone drew me in to watching this. There’s this and the fact that Francis Ford Coppola directed it. Considering everything he’s done in his career, this feels like a project from left field for him.

First off, Coppola did a great job. He really gave us that sense of wonderment Peggy Sue felt when the time travel event happens. Capturing the landscape of a suburban neighborhood in 1960, and all the high school kids in their element, feels like a very well-thought-out ode to this era. When I think of the 90s or 2000s high school generations, I think of lower self-esteemed kids, partying with drugs and alcohol, and recklessness. This may sound negative but that’s not really what I mean. This is just how film has portrayed “realistic” high school movies about this time period. However, when I think of the 50s and 60s, I think of it exactly how it’s presented to us in Peggy Sue Got Married. I’m thinking of the sitcom era! There are the naive and ambitious kids, extremely catchy, feel-good music, young love, and the idea that you should marry your high school sweetheart. Of course, there’s also the unofficial preppy dress code, the wild hairdos, and parents that try their hardest to not get divorced.

Yes, the good ol’ days.

Coppola encapsulated the energy from that time period and translated it well onscreen. You can tell he misses this bygone era. Kathleen Turner also does a great job as our star, who’s forced to deal with a whirlwind of emotions in a very short period of time. She’s very scarred from her marriage to Charlie. Just the mention of his name gets her riled up. Though she’s happy the marriage is over, she still hasn’t felt personally happy on the inside. The idea of him cheating, among many other things, is something that is burned in her brain. Though her daughter Beth doesn’t seem effected at all, Peggy Sue can’t stand the sight of him, and I mean that literally. Not only can she not stand to see him in his television commercials, but her mood also drops completely as soon as Charlie enters the room at the reunion. That’s how far gone these two are. She explains to her friend that they got married too young and blamed each other for all the things they missed out on in life. No matter how many times you’ve heard this reason in real life, it doesn’t make it any less true. Then, she adds on the other classic line of the sole positive being that she’s got a great kid out of it. Again, we all can agree there. Divorce is a bitch, but kids are always a nice reward. It’s nice to see Peggy Sue get out of her funk at the reunion though. Nothing uplifts your spirits more than talking to your friends about those fun, carefree high school days. She’s laughing, dancing, and having an all-around good time and her energy is infectious.

However, the real treat is her amazement and pure shock when she officially goes back in time. As she gets a ride back to her house, she stares at the window to see the whole world is back the way it used to be. It’s one of those “Pinch Me. Tell I’m not dreaming” moments, as she’s absolutely flabbergasted at the situation she’s in. I loved the scene where she enters her childhood bedroom and the music plays. Her expression was perfect. She’s so confused that she’s giddy. Then, she decides to enjoy herself a little bit but also not taking the moment for granted. She reconnects with her little sister, who acknowledges that Peggy is almost never happy to see her. Nothing is said before or after about what happened to Peggy’s sister but based off of her reaction to seeing her young again, my guess is that they have a horrible relationship in the present that she wanted to rectify. It’s a nice moment because we all want that time back with our siblings, and our parents for that matter. No matter how much time you do get with them, it seems that when years pass and everyone’s older, regret always creeps in about how you didn’t spend enough time with them. A scene like that meant a lot, even though in the grand scheme of things it didn’t change the story much.

Even so, Sofia Coppola almost ruined the moment again with her horrible acting. If you thought she was terrible in The Godfather III, wait until you see her here.

Another distracting acting choice was Nicolas Cage’s decision to play the role in this cartoonish, nasal-like voice. I don’t see how Charlie was so popular in this high school. How was he not constantly made fun of? With that being said, I’m not disrespecting Cage by any means. The choice was still memorable, but it definitely throws you off. There’s also a hint of his Transylvanian accent from Vampire’s Kiss in there too that I just couldn’t ignore. Most of the funny moments in the film revolve around him though, so this kind of offsets the questionable accent. The prime example being the scene in which Charlie tries to avoid having sex because of how taboo and serious it was back then. Watching him squirm around and shy away in that funny ass voice was comedic gold. The funniest moment involving him had to have been when Peggy is nice to him and “writes” the Beatles’s “She Loves You” for Charlie to use for his act (years before it came out) and he changes the lyrics to it, saying she did a pretty good job writing a song for her first time and that it just needed some tweaks. The ego and obliviousness of Charlie is a fun one to watch. He’s written very well, even though his character (due to Cage’s performance) almost seemed to be in a different movie than the one that Turner’s Peggy Sue was in.

Besides this, there are a lot of good moments that balance the humor out with drama. After the initial funny scene of Charlie breaking into Peggy’s house and almost holds a pillow over her face, implying he was thinking about killing her, what follows is a rather serious discussion over why their future won’t work. It’s difficult because Peggy actually knows what’s going to happen and Charlie, still his high school self, has no clue what she’s talking about. He tries to be persistent with her and insists on making things work, and you do feel for him a bit. However, what really hits you is Peggy screaming at him that they can’t live together anymore because she can’t trust him (for his future actions that he technically hasn’t committed yet). Then you got Cage overdoing it, as he yells “What about me?”, furthering his failed ambitions to be a singer. It’s pretty well done.

If I could point to one scene that gloriously expresses the feel of the movie, the characters, and the time period, it would have to be when Charlie and his band sing at the house party for all of their friends. Something about it is so lovable. Again, this is exactly how I like to imagine this time period, so it’s pretty cool to see it presented in such a way. Peggy’s added “I wouldn’t count on it” line, when her friend suggests they could be famous, was icing on the cake.

There were a lot of misfires, however. As I mentioned before, Turner’s approach and Cage’s approach seemed to be so different from each other that it threw off the tone of the film, and I didn’t know a lot of the time when something was supposed to be serious or not. At first, everything seemed pretty dramatic but once they went back in time and Cage got more screentime, the humor was all over the place. It was still entertaining but at times, it felt misplaced. This is especially true in the big ending, with Peggy going with her father to his Masonic lodge to have them perform a ritual on her to send her back to the present. As funny as it sounds on paper, it didn’t work at all onscreen. The fantastical element of this ritual working didn’t fit the movie whatsoever, and it just wasn’t that funny. It came off as odd. In addition, the message of the film was very fuzzy.

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

Peggy Sue is not mentally ready to get back with Charlie, but the whole film seems to point out by the end that despite Charlie’s infidelity and how their marriage legitimately fell apart, they are destined to be together. I didn’t buy it. You saw how much everything affected her in the beginning of the movie. It was so bad that a good portion of the film revolves around her refusing to give into his advances. However, the only thing she tried different was date the overly pretentious lover of poetry in Michael Fitzsimmons. I’m not sure if his character was a parody of the “loner poet” that seems to be more of a deep thinker than anyone his age or what, but his character was an absolute clown. The only thing about Fitzsimmons that was different (and actually funny) was his insistence that him and Peggy should go get married in Utah (after hanging out with her once), and he can get another wife as well because polygamy is legal over there. It was so unexpected that I laughed.

Let’s just say that it killed the mood for Peggy.

Regardless, I just don’t get why this bad experience with him is enough for her to consider Charlie again. To me, it didn’t seem like either guy was the right choice. Obviously, Charlie cared for her more, but she still knows what he does in the future and their relationship has already been proven to not work. Though it wouldn’t have fit the fairytale ending this story needed (and we got), it would make more sense for Peggy Sue to pull a Dakota Johnson in How to Be Single and try to give relationships a break (since she did miss out on so much in her life because of her marriage). This concept that you should get married to your high school sweetheart is so old school that it backed Peggy Sue into a corner. It’s like she secretly wanted it to work despite how unhappy she knows she will become. Yes, Charlie decided to quit his music dreams and move into the family business sooner to support them, but can Peggy really forget everything that will happen? I guess that’s what we’re supposed to believe, but I wasn’t too satisfied with the cheesy end of “We fell in love all over again! It needed to happen because we belong together!”. Do you? To me, it seemed like Beth existing was the only reason good enough to go through with it again. It forced her.

I guess this whole elaborate story was made just to tell us that once again, things happen for a reason.

When she returns to the present and Charlie is there waiting by the hospital bed, he looks like he’s 60 too. Neither of them is that old in the present day. In fact, Charlie didn’t even look that bad in the opening of the movie. So, why did it look like he aged 30 more years over the few days that Peggy Sue’s been in the hospital for this scene? The makeup artist needed a stern talking to here.

Peggy Sue Got Married did a lot of things right. I felt like the dramatic moments were handled much better than the comedy though, with the bigger highlights being Peggy talking to her grandmother on the phone and her reaction because in the present, she’s long passed. Special moments like these and with her family, as well as her reactions to the people around her, really show that the character deserved either a more somber movie, or the film needed more comedy in general. I don’t know. Something felt missing to the overall product. The last half hour was all over the place too. It felt like its major potential flew out the window after seeing all the different directions they take you in the final act. Peggy Sue Got Married is a solid watch but ultimately, it left me a bit unfulfilled.

Fun Fact: Debra Winger was originally set to star.