Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

The premise

It's 1985, and Peggy Sue Bodell (Kathleen Turner) has separated from Charlie (Nicolas Cage), the high school sweetheart she married, because he cheated on her. She goes to her 25th high school reunion anyway, with her daughter, Beth (Helen Hunt), and not much enthusiasm. Talking to an old friend, she admits that if she could go back, she'd make different choices. Then her class crowns her reunion queen, and she faints on stage.

She comes to in 1960, at a blood drive at Buchanan High, in her senior year. Her friends put her strange behavior down to blood loss, but the truth is odder: her adult mind is now sitting inside her teenage body. Her parents, Evelyn (Barbara Harris) and Jack (Don Murray), are young again, her little sister, Nancy (Sofia Coppola), still lives at home, and her friends Maddy (Joan Allen) and Carol (Catherine Hicks) are teenagers. Teenage Charlie is waiting for her too, and unlike him, she knows how their marriage will turn out.

How it handles time

There's no machine here, no portal, and no scientist with a formula. Peggy Sue passes out in one decade and wakes up in another, and the film never offers a scientific explanation for the switch. The AFI Catalog's synopsis says she knows she's "trapped in a time warp," which is about as technical as the movie gets. Nothing physical travels. Only her mind goes back, into a body that's already there waiting for it.

The one firm rule is visual, and Coppola never breaks it. Turner is never made to look younger: she plays her 1960 self at her real age, and everyone around her treats her as a kid. Roger Ebert described the convention at the time: "the heroine looks adult to us, but like a teenager to the other characters." On paper it sounds like a shortcut. On screen it's the best decision in the film, because you never lose sight of the adult doing the reliving, and every family dinner plays as both a scene and a memory of one.

Peggy Sue does try to get home the sensible way first. She confides in Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), the class science whiz, hoping his grasp of physics can send her back to 1985, and she convinces him she's telling the truth by describing technology that doesn't exist yet. Later she tries a far less scientific route, which I'll leave for the spoiler section. Neither attempt comes with rules you could write down, and the script doesn't pretend otherwise.

The film's real interest is the question that sits under most time-travel stories: would you choose differently if you knew how everything turned out? Peggy Sue knows Charlie will cheat. She has to decide whether to live that year again the same way or steer it somewhere new, and the pull between those two options is the whole plot. Ebert, reviewing it on release, called the film a "mirror image" of Back to the Future (1985). In that film the hero goes back to meet his parents as teenagers. Here Peggy Sue has to be the teenager at her parents' table.

What works

Turner carries the film, and the awards people noticed. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar and a Golden Globe, and the National Board of Review named her Best Actress of 1986. Ebert wrote that her work "must be seen to be believed." What I like most is how little she plays up the gimmick. At home she's openly grateful to her mother and makes an effort with her younger sister, but she stays cool toward her father, and each of those shifts reads as a 40-something woman's second thoughts rather than a teenager's mood swings.

The supporting cast is fun to spot now. Joan Allen and Catherine Hicks play her friends, Jim Carrey turns up as Walter Getz, and Helen Hunt plays her grown daughter. Sofia Coppola, the director's daughter, is her sister. Maureen O'Sullivan and Leon Ames are her grandparents, and John Carradine appears as Leo.

The 1960 on screen looks like a memory someone has polished for 25 years. Jordan Cronenweth's cinematography and Theadora Van Runkle's costumes were both nominated for Oscars, and Dean Tavoularis designed the production. Richard Kelly later showed his crew clips from the film as a reference for the night scenes in Donnie Darko (2001); what he wanted, according to a BFI Education text, was its "burnished nostalgia." The film was shot in Sonoma County, California, with Santa Rosa High School standing in for Buchanan High.

The music does a lot of the time traveling for you. Buddy Holly's 1959 song "Peggy Sue Got Married," which gave the film its title and its heroine her name, plays over the opening credits. John Barry wrote the score, and the soundtrack drops in period songs such as "Tequila" by The Champs and "Teenager in Love" by Dion & the Belmonts.

What doesn't

Nicolas Cage is the problem, and by his own account it was a choice. He has said he turned the part down five or six times and only agreed if he could play Charlie in an over-the-top way, and he based the character's nasal voice on Pokey from The Gumby Show. Turner is playing real regret opposite him, and he's playing a cartoon. The film's central question, whether she should marry this man again, gets harder to take seriously when he's doing that voice. Rita Kempley called it an "icky performance" in The Washington Post. I wouldn't go that far, but I never understood what either version of Peggy Sue saw in him.

Kempley also complained about a "pokey opening," and I agree with her there. The 1985 reunion takes its time getting Peggy Sue onto that stage, and the setup feels long for a film that runs 103 minutes.

The nostalgia is softer than it needs to be, too. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus files the film among "'80s boomer nostalgia films" before making the case for Turner, and that's fair: 1960 here is lovely to look at, and the script rarely questions why she might want to go back to it. Anyone expecting a caper in the style of Back to the Future should adjust, because this is a slower, sadder film about adult regret. Tri-Star noticed the same thing: it revised its plan to sell the movie as a follow-up to that film after finding that teenagers liked it less than it had hoped.

Final score

Overall: 7/10. Good, with clear weaknesses: one of the best lead performances in any time-travel film, opposite a love interest the movie never makes worth the trip.

Paradox Meter: 2/5. There's no mechanism to test beyond a fainting spell and a casting convention, and the one piece of hard evidence the film offers raises questions it chooses not to answer.

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2001 · Film

Donnie Darko

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1989 · Series

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• Frequency (2000): another time-travel story where a second chance at the past is the whole point. (not on the site yet)