Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner in one of my favourite performances of hers) has the middle-aged blues. Her marriage to her high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is practically over, and she doesn’t seem to quite have had the life she hoped for when she was young. There must have been some happy years with Charlie in-between, though, and they produced a daughter (Helen Hunt) who clearly has turned out fine and loves both of her parents.

Still, her daughter’s emotional support notwithstanding, Peggy Sue’s feeling bad, and she’s even worse because she has to go to her 25th high school reunion right when she’s having the worst time of her life. When she faints while being crowned reunion queen, she suddenly awakes in 1960, her graduation year, in the body of her younger self (though the film keeps us seeing her as Turner).

Peggy Sue has no idea what’s happening to her, but with twenty-five years of experience and a knowledge of her accumulated mistakes, she decides she’s going to correct what must have gone wrong with her life. Though she just might add some new mistakes of the “live a little” type on the way.

Looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s career beyond the obvious classics, one can regularly encounter semi-hidden gems like Peggy Sue Got Married. On the surface, this is a pretty typical time-shift comedy probably made possible by the success of Back to the Future. Consequently, it goes through quite a few jokes of the kind you’d expect from the set-up – see Peggy Sue’s parents freak out over her sudden grown-up behaviour, see Peggy Sue predict the technological future – and has some space for what you’d probably call boomer nostalgia for pop culture.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspects of the film to my eyes – the jokes are good and the nostalgia actually feeds into the narrative effectively and thoughtfully. If the film were only that, there’s still be a lot to like about it. However, Coppola fills a lot of the proceedings with a genuine sense of melancholia and quiet sadness. This is core to the film’s emotional honesty: whenever it talks about who Peggy Sue was as a teenager and who she grows up into, it avoids seeing the teen perspective as wrong and the more cynical adult one right or the other way around. Instead, the film emphasises again and again, it’s a matter of perspective born in the moment, and life’s not an abstract.

Which also means that Charlie – played with a mix of mania and insight by Cage that’s pretty damn irresistible - does turn out not to be a mistake to be avoided but a guy who genuinely cares about Peggy Sue deeply – in the sort of young person’s way we tend to forget we could feel when we get older – and whose own growing into imperfect middle age is not a thing to be changed by clever tricks but a process that can’t be avoided, though perhaps understood and thereby gotten through as much as Peggy Sue’s own middle-aged sadness can. The film presents no easy answer there but a quiet hope.

In general, there’s a quiet kindness to the way the film treats its characters, which in many ways is mirrored by the small kindnesses middle-aged Peggy Sue as young Peggy Sue spends on most of the people around her this time around, be they useful to her plans of building a better future, or not. One of the philosophical main tenets of Peggy Sue Got Married appears to be “don’t be an asshole”, and why would anyone want to disagree with that?