Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

 Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)


Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married is an interesting movie. If you have read my movie reviews from past films, you would realize I have many of those regarding films directed by Coppola. He is the man at the forefront of advancing cinema with new various stylistic and technological innovations. Most of them push boundaries with varying results. Here, which is shocking at first, is a film that he made just to make a film. He has strong characters and raw emotions and he makes a story out of it. Mostly, it is nothing special. It is your average story about a middle-aged woman trying to find herself by traveling to her younger years-a very similar concept to Back to the Future. The movie is fun and has some clever concepts and dialogue, but do not go thinking it is the same Coppola who directed The Godfather or Apocalypse Now.

 

Believe it or not, Coppola was actually the third director the studio hired to bring the project to life. This was originally a Jonathan Demme vehicle with Debra Winger in the lead. They had creative differences so Demme left the project which opened the door for Penny Marshall as this film would be her movie debut. Once again, creative issues forced Marshall (and Winger) to leave. The studio, TriStar, hired Coppola to take over the project to entice Winger back. Instead, Kathleen Turner came on board as the titular character. It is a treat if you can have an actress like Turner play in a somewhat offbeat comedy film with fantasy elements. Her performance is the best part about the movie.

 

Peggy Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is 42 years old and lives unhappily with her high-school sweetheart, Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage). Charlie is a failed musician and Peggy believes that Charlie blames her for that. She has the made the decision to divorce him. At her high-school reunion, she is mysteriously transported back 25 years earlier to her life during senior year. Peggy Sue is now eighteen again…with a 42-year-old mind! After suffering from initial shock, she believes she could change decisions she made to make her future life better. She also gets to see why Charlie acted the way he did and made the decisions that he did.

 

Kathleen Turner is the best part about the movie. She nailed the comedic moments and the emotional moments. My only concern with Turner is that she looked too old to be a teenager. She acted like one pretty well, but one could see she is way too old. After all, she was 32 when the film was in production. Such is life in Hollywood! Infamously, she and Nic Cage did not get along on set. She claimed that he was arrested twice and stole a chihuahua, which is a Nic Cage thing to do. That said, Nic Cage also did a good job playing a character you just love to hate. Speaking for the future, keep an eye out for Jim Carrey as one of Cage’s bandmates.

 

I think Coppola hit the emotional beats well. I won’t deny that I was moved by the scene where Peggy heard her grandmother’s voice again. Anyone whose grandparents passed on can definitely relate to that and I did because I saw this movie for the first time right after my grandma passed so it was extremely poignant for me.

 

That said, Peggy Sue Got Married is a movie that will captivate you in the moment but you will likely to forget most of it when you try to recall it. It has similar concepts to the far superior Back to the Future, but this film plays more to the comedy side. The 80’s has many films that has the boomer era looking fondly on their lives 20-30 years prior and how life has changed since then. Some of the dialogue will show that. Thanks to Turner’s captivating performance, I do give the film a slight recommend.

 

My Grade: B-


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Image
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” Ah, wise words from our new young friend, Ferris Bueller. In John Hughes’s 1986 film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , all Ferris wants to do is take a day and have fun. That is the most simplistic theme the movie has. You can go deeper, but the main takeaway is that it is okay to have fun. That is a motto I have taken to heart. I really loved the film. People consider The Breakfast Club to be Hughes’s best and most important movie. That’s a fine statement to make, but I would personally rank the film number two behind this particular one. The teen characters are instantly relatable, it has a memorable antagonist for the children, and this is basically a thirty-year-old travel guide for Chicago. Just how Woody Allen creates his movies as love letters for New York, this is applicable for John Hughes. A Chicago love letter!   Like all of his films, Hughes wrote...
Read more

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Image
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) The James Bond franchise is one of those franchises that will never die. It has been going strong since the first movie rolled out in the early 1960’s, and new James Bond movies are still produced today. What makes this series unique is they use multiple actors to play the titular character over the years. They all bring their own gravitas to the role, and each Bond is a different man when compared to each other (although the martini, shaken not stirred and the beautiful women among other things remain a constant.) So my first James Bond review for this blog is 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. This wasn’t my first look at the series, but it was my first look at the older movies. I really liked what I saw. This is an old-fashioned story that combines a spy drama and an action-packed war movie into one package. Like many of the older Bond movies, the story can get borderline preposterous. The cheesiness of the plot did come to grow on me after awhile, even...
Read more

Table for Five (1983)

Image
Table for Five (1983) I can guarantee that ninety percent of my readers here have not seen this tear-jerking melodrama 1983’s Table for Five , yet alone heard of it. Hopefully after reading my kind words, you will be somewhat intrigued by this movie. When doing my research for the film, I was shocked to see how vastly underrated the movie is. There are only a few reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, hardly any information on Wikipedia or Google-hardly anything out there in this vast Internet landscape. Then, why on earth is this movie so good? Sure, maybe some folks will say the movie is just a predictable Lifetime TV movie, but honestly it is much more than that. There are some elements that makes this film seem destined for the television at times, but to me it is much more than that. I consider the movie to be an honest, emotional portrayal about fatherhood and family. Directed by Robert Lieberman, this film is about a man named J.P Tannen (Jon Voight) who fails at being fathe...
Read more