The title "Peggy Sue Got Married" is borrowed from the song by Buddy Holly which is played over the opening credits. The title character is Peggy Sue Bodell, a forty-something American housewife who is separated from her husband Charlie because of his infidelity. At a 25-year high school reunion, Peggy Sue faints while being crowned as "Reunion Queen". When she awakens, she discovers that it is now 1960 and she is once again Peggy Sue Kelcher, a teenager at high school.
The theme of the film is "what would you do if you could live your life over again?" Finding herself back in her schooldays, yet still retaining her memories of the period between 1960 and 1985, Peggy Sue determines to avoid the mistakes she made the first time round. This essentially means avoiding marriage to Charlie, her high-school sweetheart whom she had to marry after he got her pregnant. She considers two other possible boyfriends, the school's science geek Richard who in the world of 1985 is a wealthy inventor and industrialist, and Michael, a bookish intellectual. (Unlike most bookish intellectuals in American high school dramas, Michael is not a geek or a nerd but cool and good-looking). In the end, however, she decides that she still loves Charlie and ends up making the same choice again. After waking up in hospital back in 1985, she and a repentant Charlie reconcile.
After the first two instalments of the "Godfather" trilogy and "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppola was regarded as a virtual god of the cinema, but in the early eighties he had a fall from grace almost as great as that suffered by Michael Cimino at around the same time, the difference being that it only took one film, "Heaven's Gate", to destroy Cimino's reputation, whereas Coppola had several costly failures. ("One from the Heart", "Rumble Fish", "The Cotton Club"). He would not be the first director most people would associate with light-hearted fantasy comedy movies, and was only the third choice for "Peggy Sue Got Married", taking over after both Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall had dropped out. The film, however, provided him with one of his few financial successes of the eighties. (He was to have two more flops in the latter part of the decade, "Gardens of Stone" and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream".
The film was also a critical success, but it has never been a favourite of mine, either when I saw it in the cinema in 1986 or when I watched it again recently. Kathleen Turner was nominated for an Academy Award for "Best Actress", the only such nomination of her career. (She lost to Marlee Matlin for "Children of a Lesser God"). I felt, however, that the film was handicapped by the decision to use the same actors to play the same characters in both their older and younger incarnations. In 1986 Turner was a beautiful young woman in her early thirties, and I did not find her particularly convincing either as a careworn forty-something housewife or as a teenage schoolgirl.
Mind you I could not accept Nicolas Cage as a teenage schoolboy either, and he would only have been 22 in 1986, just a few years older than the character he was playing. He was even less convincing as the older Charlie. Cage, born Nicolas Coppola, is of course the nephew of the director. According to him, his uncle begged him to take the role and he only accepted if he could play it in an "over the top" manner. There is certainly something cartoonish about his acting, which I found inappropriate. Peggy Sue, after all, is supposed to be a sympathetic character, so the man whom she loves, despite his faults, needs to be seen as a real person, not a caricature. Turner disagreed with Cage's interpretation, leading to friction between the two, and it shows. They never seem like a couple in love.
In the seventies and eighties Hollywood made a series of nostalgic films set in the late fifties and early sixties, possibly because following the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate this era was seen as the time of a kinder, gentler and more carefree America. Compared to the likes of "American Graffiti", "Grease" and "Diner", however, "Peggy Sue Got Married" has always struck me as one of the weaker entries in the series, with its time-travel theme adding little of interest. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if Peggy Sue had made a different choice- say, leaving Charlie for Michael- second time around. 5/10.
The theme of the film is "what would you do if you could live your life over again?" Finding herself back in her schooldays, yet still retaining her memories of the period between 1960 and 1985, Peggy Sue determines to avoid the mistakes she made the first time round. This essentially means avoiding marriage to Charlie, her high-school sweetheart whom she had to marry after he got her pregnant. She considers two other possible boyfriends, the school's science geek Richard who in the world of 1985 is a wealthy inventor and industrialist, and Michael, a bookish intellectual. (Unlike most bookish intellectuals in American high school dramas, Michael is not a geek or a nerd but cool and good-looking). In the end, however, she decides that she still loves Charlie and ends up making the same choice again. After waking up in hospital back in 1985, she and a repentant Charlie reconcile.
After the first two instalments of the "Godfather" trilogy and "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppola was regarded as a virtual god of the cinema, but in the early eighties he had a fall from grace almost as great as that suffered by Michael Cimino at around the same time, the difference being that it only took one film, "Heaven's Gate", to destroy Cimino's reputation, whereas Coppola had several costly failures. ("One from the Heart", "Rumble Fish", "The Cotton Club"). He would not be the first director most people would associate with light-hearted fantasy comedy movies, and was only the third choice for "Peggy Sue Got Married", taking over after both Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall had dropped out. The film, however, provided him with one of his few financial successes of the eighties. (He was to have two more flops in the latter part of the decade, "Gardens of Stone" and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream".
The film was also a critical success, but it has never been a favourite of mine, either when I saw it in the cinema in 1986 or when I watched it again recently. Kathleen Turner was nominated for an Academy Award for "Best Actress", the only such nomination of her career. (She lost to Marlee Matlin for "Children of a Lesser God"). I felt, however, that the film was handicapped by the decision to use the same actors to play the same characters in both their older and younger incarnations. In 1986 Turner was a beautiful young woman in her early thirties, and I did not find her particularly convincing either as a careworn forty-something housewife or as a teenage schoolgirl.
Mind you I could not accept Nicolas Cage as a teenage schoolboy either, and he would only have been 22 in 1986, just a few years older than the character he was playing. He was even less convincing as the older Charlie. Cage, born Nicolas Coppola, is of course the nephew of the director. According to him, his uncle begged him to take the role and he only accepted if he could play it in an "over the top" manner. There is certainly something cartoonish about his acting, which I found inappropriate. Peggy Sue, after all, is supposed to be a sympathetic character, so the man whom she loves, despite his faults, needs to be seen as a real person, not a caricature. Turner disagreed with Cage's interpretation, leading to friction between the two, and it shows. They never seem like a couple in love.
In the seventies and eighties Hollywood made a series of nostalgic films set in the late fifties and early sixties, possibly because following the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate this era was seen as the time of a kinder, gentler and more carefree America. Compared to the likes of "American Graffiti", "Grease" and "Diner", however, "Peggy Sue Got Married" has always struck me as one of the weaker entries in the series, with its time-travel theme adding little of interest. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if Peggy Sue had made a different choice- say, leaving Charlie for Michael- second time around. 5/10.