Peggy Sue Got Married

MOVIE #1,681 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 05.30.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 64. I will eventually get to a Francis Ford Coppola Director Focus (of course I will), but because the Year of Cage takes precedence, we’re going out of order. Actually TWO of Coppola's relatives were cast in the film: his daughter Sofia Coppola as Peggy Sue's sister, and our man, his nephew Nicolas Cage as Peggy's boyfriend and then estranged husband, Charlie. (Cage has later said he never wanted to play the role, but was asked multiple times by Coppola and he only agreed to take the part if he could play it in an over-the-top manner.) This is one of the classic Cage roles and his weirdness is on display right from the opening scene where we see him briefly on TV in a commercial for his local appliance store empire as his soon-to-be divorced wife (Kathleen Turner as the titular Peggy Sue) gets ready for her high school reunion with daughter Helen Hunt…

Holy shit, Jim Carrey is in this?! I feel like such an idiot for both never having seen this and not knowing a damn thing about it. Anyway, we see him doing coke because he's a dentist?...


Everything's going smoothly at the reunion when guess-who shows up. After Peggy Sue wins the reunion homecoming queen honors, she becomes overwhelmed by the moment and faints. When she comes to, she's magically at a high school blood drive back in the year 1960, and young Cage is there acting the fool…


A freaked out Peggy Sue is sent home for the day where she's reunited with her baby sister, played by Sophia Coppola…


I think she's a great actor, personally.

Peggy Sue gets drunk and declares that she's gonna go to Liverpool and discover the Beatles (honestly not a bad plot for a movie, and this motif will show up later as well).

I would be majorly freaked out in this situation but Peggy Sue brushes off the insanity of the scenario and falls right back into high school life with no real issue. But with a caveat: she's going to use this fantastical moment to preemptively break up with Cage. He's a bit suspicious of her behavior, though not as much as his friend Jim Carrey, who gets to do a proto version of his classic schtick…


She has the hots for a brooding boy who runs track. So Cage tries a different tact…


I'm sure there's been plenty written about this over-the-top performance but, I have to say, it works! It's crazy and strange, sure, but it's also sweet and weirdly endearing (Cage in a nutshell, perhaps).

Peggy Sue goes to the nerdy guy (who was named king at the reunion) and she asks him if time travel is possible. He tells her that time is like a burrito and Peggy Sue spills the beans about her cosmic dilemma…


Peggy Sue ultimately proves to him that she's telling the truth. She struggles with other aspects of this life re-do, like when she gets sad hearing her grandma's voice on the telephone and when she has a pretty unhelpful “birds and the bees” convo with her mom…


Cage comes to visit the Sue household and it seems like his voice gets higher in certain scenes than others…


Cage takes her out to a party where he and Jim Carrey's doowop group happens to be performing…


The gist of this is pretty evident: she's learning to love Cage again via this magical convergence. I don't think it makes the movie less entertaining (and perhaps I personally just want something different out of cinema these days), but I wish this was a little more subversive.

Cage and Peggy Sue make out at the party and then again in his car. She wants to screw him but he gets all weird about it…


Just classic Cage line-reads there.

The night ends with them in a big fight and Peggy Sue goes off wandering around town where she runs into poet runner man. This guy hates Hemingway and loves Kerouac. Typical beatnik. She gets on his motorcycle (and her friend sees her). They go off into the woods to smoke reefer. They hook up.

The next morning she sees Cage and clearly feels bad about what she did because he's just too damn sweet. Then she meets up with the nerd to go over ideas for future inventions. It's a fun scene…


Peggy Sue's girlfriends come over to gossip about her excursion with the commie beatnik. Later that night, Cage sneaks into Peggy Sue's room and what is he doing with his hands here?…


He confronts her about cheating on him. Cage is great…


Peggy Sue brings up the fact that he has an affair in the future which really confuses Cage. Good stuff. She wants to break up with him for good but he can't let it go. Check out this rad cigarette holder/music box…


Then Peggy Sue finds out that the poet wants her to move to Utah with him and get into polygamy and raise chickens with a girl named Rita. And, yeah, she's not into that. At the club they're at, Cage gets up on stage to sing with a real band, surprising Peggy Sue. Unfortunately, the club owner tells Cage that it's a no-go as far as becoming a regular part of the entertainment, breaking his spirit.

The next morning, Peggy Sue confronts Cage walking his dog and tells him about seeing his performance. She gives him a song she says she wrote for him. Hmmm. They seem to reconcile.

The nerd asks her to marry him and she title drops…


She runs into Cage and we learn that the song she ‘wrote’ was “She Loves You” by The Beatles. Cage punches it up of course (that’s the joke). She cancels date plans with him to go visit her grandparents. And, sure the music is overblown, but I thought this scene was very beautiful…


In a comical twist for the ages, Peggy Sue's grandpa turns out to be a member of a time-traveling group of Freemasons and he immediately agrees to do an ancient ceremony that will send her back to the future. Yup. I don't write screenplays for a living, but it's pretty clear that any other ending would have been better than this, especially after the sweet and human interaction that preceded it…


But Cage thwarts her plan to time-travel home and tells her that he's gonna give up his singing dream and basically begin the life they already had together. She's pretty distraught about it all. But he gives her the locket necklace she had in the present and they screw, fulfilling the prophecy of her getting pregnant on her 18th birthday.

Flashforward to Peggy Sue waking up from a coma…


The movie hints that maybe the brief time she re-did in high school actually happened? It's not really important. She reconciles with Cage and we get the happy/bittersweet ending we all saw coming a mile away.

While the film does reverse course on the impromptu time-traveling Freemasons bit, that truly took me out of the movie. I still really enjoyed it overall, but that was unforgivable and, frankly, unnecessary.

It does feature a classic and infamous Cage performance, and that is undeniable. He has said that he was trying to mimic the voice of Pokey from the claymation kids show, Gumby. AS ONE DOES. Kathleen Turner has spoken out about how frustrating this was and has said that while it didn’t ruin the movie, it didn’t add anything to it either. I would counter by saying that it’s actually one of the only reasons people still mention this film? I mean, it’s an FFC joint so it has weight regardless (and as a CageHead, I’m clearly biased) but if it were another actor doing a paint-by-numbers, serviceable job, I think this movie would be mostly forgotten.

THE VERDICT: 8 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

---

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,680 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,682 ⫸

---

Peggy Sue Got Married is a 1986 American fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola starring Kathleen Turner as a woman on the verge of a divorce, who finds herself transported back to the days of her senior year in high school in 1960. The film was written by husband-and-wife team Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner. It was released on October 10, 1986.