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| Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage |
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986).
Director: Francis (Ford) Coppola.
Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is separated from her husband, high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage of Ghost Rider), due to his adultery. She has mixed emotions about going to her 25-year high school reunion, but her daughter, Beth (Helen Hunt), importunes her to attend. After being crowned queen, Peggy Sue passes out and wakes up a quarter century in the past. She has an adult mind in a teenager's body! Trying to figure out if she's dead or simply going crazy, she has to determine if she wants to make the same mistakes -- such as marrying Charlie -- that she made before.
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| Nicolas Cage |
The basic premise of
Peggy Sue, while not especially original, is compelling. Unfortunately, what the screenwriters have come up with doesn't do nearly enough with the material.
Peggy Sue boasts some fine acting -- Turner and Cage are especially good if imperfect -- Jordan Cronenweth's photography is first-rate, and whenever the film seems emotionally moving it's undoubtedly due to John Barry's evocative scoring. The movie is a typical Hollywood "concept" picture which does as little with the concept as it possibly can. What could have been an especially affecting sequence when Peggy Sue goes to see her long-dead grandparents is turned into a weird bit of nonsense involving the old man's lodge brothers. (We never learn if her
parents were still alive 25 years later.) It's as if the movie was merely a sequence of bits thrown together in the hopes it will turn into a cohesive whole. By the ending, nothing is really resolved. Peggy Sue is right back where she started. The whole time travel business is handled too prosaically anyway.
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| Barbara Harris |
A disturbing aspect of the picture is that more than once Peggy Sue mentions how much she loves and misses her two children (we only see one). This begs the question: how can she
not marry Charlie when it means her beloved children (at least one of them) will no longer exist -- but this never seems to occur to her. The superficial script doesn't wrestle with metaphysical issues in any case. So we're left with some interesting casting: Barbara Harris [
Family Plot] as Peggy Sue's mother; Leon Ames and Maureen O'Sullivan as her grandparents; Barry Miller as the high school geek who makes good; John Carradine as a lodge member; and Kevin J. O'Connor [
Deep Rising] as the romantic, mysterious school poet. While Barry's score adds a lot to the movie, it is not as good as his work on
Somewhere in Time or
Out of Africa.
Verdict: Well-acted and reasonably entertaining, this is still a perfect example of how Hollywood can screw up fantasy-type movies. **1/4.
2 comments:
I am a big fan of this movie, Bill, but agree that the premise could have been fleshed out further. Love all the actors in this, the music and the metaphysical feel of the whole thing. Coppola has a tendency for his scripts to have a sketchy and unfinished feel to them, without a Mario Puzo to give him the story points! The Outsiders is another of his very stylish films but has even more plot holes than this one. Nevertheless, this is a favorite of mine and I have enjoyed it again and again.
-C
It did strike a chord in a lot of people back when it was released, possibly because everyone wonders what they would do if they could live their life over. But as you say, every good idea still needs a good script, and I just don't think "Peggy Sue" had one, as entertaining as it was.
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