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Review
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED
Rating: 
USA. 1986.
Director – Francis Coppola, Screenplay – Jerry Leichtling & Arlene Sarner, Producer – Paul R. Gurian, Photography – Jordan Cronenweth, Music – John Barry, Production Design – Dean Tavoularis. Production Company – Paul R. Gurian/Zoetrope.
Cast:
Kathleen Turner (Peggy Sue Kelcher), Nicholas Cage (Charlie Bodell), Barry Miller (Richard Norvik), Kevin J. Connor (Michael Fitzsimmons)
Plot: Peggy Sue Kelcher attends the 25th anniversary of her high school graduating class, where she is voted prom queen. But as she steps up to accept the crown, she collapses. She comes around to discover that she is somehow back in 1960 and a teenager again. With the benefit of hindsight, Peggy Sue decides that she will no longer marry her boyfriend Charlie Waddell, as she did straight after graduation, something that ended in divorce 25 years later. She now takes the opportunity to live the life she always wanted to.
Francis Ford Coppola was one of the most exciting and visionary directors to emerge in the 1970s with extraordinary works like The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979). But the artistry of Francis Ford Coppola’s vision also came with a recklessness that caused many of his films to spiral wildly over-budget. Into the 1980s many of Coppola’s films – One from the Heart (1981), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984) – their virtuoso directorial brilliance aside, met mixed critical reception and moreover caused Coppola’s American Zoetrope studios to teeter into bankruptcy. Coppola’s films subsequent to that have been more constrained and budgetarily under control and, it also seems, more conservative in their vision – after all how much more mainstream can you get than adapting John Grisham thrillers – as Coppola did with The Rainmaker (1997)?
Francis Ford Coppola, like Martin Scorsese, has a limitless ability to dabble in almost any genre that takes his fancy – he has covered everything from gangster films, war movies, Chick Flicks, horror, children’s films, musicals and courtroom thrillers. Peggy Sue Got Married was Coppola’s venture into whimsical fantasy. It was a production where, following the problems with his own studio, Coppola signed on as a director-for-hire to a project after the likes of Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall had opted out. Thus Peggy Sue Got Married is a less personal film that many of Coppola’s other works. (To signify such, for the first time Coppola drops the Ford from his name and bills himself merely as Francis Coppola). Peggy Sue Got Married was highly acclaimed in many quarters – in fact was placed on many critics Top 10 lists for the year. Notedly the places Peggy Sue was acclaimed were amongst those who were its demographic audience – the fortysomething age group, while it received almost no attention or coverage within the science-fiction/fantasy genre.
There seems too much of a respectability to Peggy Sue Got Married to dare suggest it is a Back to the Future (1985) copycat. Nevertheless it is, even if it its aims are a little higher than exploitation. It’s a likable affair in places, but ultimately unmoving. It’s certainly one of Francis Ford Coppola’s blander films – look at it alongside the epic sweep of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now and you see just how lacking it is. There’s some amusing parodies of the Beat Generation and a certain amount of wit in the scenes with Peggy Sue’s parents – their reaction to her taking a drink to steady her nerves, her bursting out in laughter at her father bringing home a brand-new Edsel. But it lacks the uproariousness of true humour. And when it can’t keep it up, all there is to fall back on is a flaky sentimental lack of sincerity.
Its central conceit aside, Peggy Sue Got Married is a film that is almost negligible as fantasy. It’s devoid of real science-fiction too – any explanation of its time-travel phenomenon is wholly ignored. (And other pieces like the lodge having been founded by a time-traveller are never explained either). As with many sf/fantasy films of the 1980s – E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Back to the Future and others – it is a narcissistic fantasy of Baby Boomers being able to set their lives right. Despite their similarities there is an enormous difference between Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future – whereas Back to the Future came with a clever, snappy plot driven by sharp twists and filled with witty cultural asides, Peggy Sue Got Married only wallows in nostalgia. All its fantasy is is the maudlin one of a middle-aged housewife sorting out her failed marriage. And here Francis Ford Coppola depressingly fails to allow Kathleen Turner to rearrange her own life, merely ending with her banally settling for the same old life all over again.
Kathleen Turner comes close to pulling it all together with her sly, natural ability with humour, although she never for a moment succeeds in convincing us she is a teenager. The film is handicapped by Nicholas Cage (Coppola’s cousin) in Silly Performance mode, where Coppola allows him to play the whole way through in a ridiculous hoarse voice. Cage clearly has a lot of natural charisma and energy, but it is the distracting silliness of the voice that does him in – he is like a teenager whose voice is dropping. (In her recent autobiography, Kathleen Turner amusingly claimed that much of this was done by the young Cage to publicly defy Coppola and show people he was not under Coppola’s wing, although Cage issued vigorous denials).
Francis Ford Coppola’s other films of genre interest are:– the re-edited Russian sf film Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), the psycho-thriller Dementia 13/The Haunted and the Hunted (1963), the leprechaun musical Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Youth Without Youth (2007) about a man who miraculously regains his youth. Last updated: Monday, 06 April 2009
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