Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) * * * *

Directed by:  Francis Ford Coppola

Starring:  Kathleen Turner, Nicolas Cage, Don Murray, Joan Allen, Jim Carrey, Barry Miller, Kevin J. O'Connor, Barbara Harris, Sofia Coppola

Peggy Sue Got Married takes a plot which could've been mired in sitcom treatment and instead plumbs it for all of its intelligence and sentiment.   At times, it nearly moved me to tears, because it is about the moments a teenager takes for granted which will be all the more meaningful years later. 
At seventeen, you have your whole life ahead of you.   Peggy Sue Kelcher Bodell (Turner) is privileged to be seventeen years old twice. 

We first meet Peggy Sue and her soon-to-be-ex husband Charlie (Cage) at their 25th high school reunion, where Peggy Sue passes out and wakes up in 1960 as a senior in high school.    Peggy doesn't know how or why, but she is a forty-plus-year old adult stuck in a teenage body.   Everyone else believes this is the same Peggy Sue they see every day, but they do notice she isn't herself.   
Peggy Sue comes home to find her parents and sister still alive and she is absolutely enthralled to be there.    These aren't simply memories.   She is actually there.    When her grandmother, who will die in two years, calls, Peggy Sue answers the phone and finds she can't speak to her.   Words escape her. 

This is one of many things Peggy Sue Got Married gets right.    It takes a few moments to reflect on the sheer awesomeness of suddenly being transported twenty-five years backward in time.   By the time of the reunion, Peggy Sue and Charlie are headed for divorce thanks to his affairs with multiple women.    But the 1960 version of Charlie, with his nasal voice and prominent teeth, adores Peggy Sue.   He knows he wants to marry her, so you would have to wonder where in the future it all goes wrong.    But does Peggy Sue, knowing how the future will turn out, want to marry Charlie?   Or even see him again?   Will she forge her own path which doesn't include Charlie? 

In an attempt to make sense of it all, Peggy Sue confides in the class nerd Richard (Miller), who in the future will be the toast of the reunion due to his financial success as an inventor, that she indeed time traveled.    The scene doesn't devolve into a sitcom argument, but Peggy Sue plainly convinces him of the truth, and because Richard loves science, he believes her.    But, there is the nagging issue of Charlie, who can't understand Peggy Sue's erratic behavior.    Last week, she apparently didn't want to have sex, but now that she has returned with a forty-year-old mindset, she wants to have sex with Charlie, which confounds him even more.    "That's a guy's line," he tells Peggy Sue, who is astonished at Charlie's reluctance to go all the way.

Charlie wants to be a singer ("I've got the hair, I've got the teeth"), but he doesn't have the talent.   In one of many humorous anachronisms, Peggy Sue gives him lyrics to a Beatles song which Charlie promptly changes and messes up.    The truth is, Peggy Sue knows abundantly what is forthcoming, but doesn't have the means or drive to take advantage of it.    She doesn't want to go to Liverpool to discover The Beatles, she only wants to ensure her future is happier the second time around.

Kathleen Turner gives her career-best and only Oscar-nominated performance to date.   Peggy Sue Got Married doesn't make the sense of trying to make Turner look seventeen.    She looks older than your average seventeen year old, but that doesn't matter, because in a way, she is already more mature than her peers because she has been through this already.    Turner nails it.   Nicolas Cage used to be quite an actor before he became a showbiz punchline.    Here he is appropriately gawky and awkward, and finds he is outmatched all of a sudden by Peggy Sue.    He never truly figures out what
has gotten into her.

Peggy Sue Got Married's 1960 scenes are almost dreamlike, and John Barry's moving score reminds us of another time travel romance, 1980's Somewhere in Time.    Director Francis Ford Coppola reminds us that the greatness of the director of The Godfather trilogy still resided in him.    Peggy Sue Got Married is about time travel, yes, but it is not science fiction, but instead a glorious tour of the human heart.