So, every month I check HBO Max to see what from my long watchlist is on the way out at the end of the month. This month actually had a lot of stuff departing, but most of it was British TV shows, anime, and documentaries that I probably wasn’t going to watch anyway. In fact, there were only three or four movies on my watchlist, one of which was the time travel comedy Peggy Sue Got Married. I almost watched that the same day as The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, but I figured there might be such a thing as too much Nicholas Cage in one day.
Then I put the movie on and learned it also had early roles for both Helen Hunt and Jim Carrey, plus one of the last roles for classic movie actress Maureen O’Sullivan. OK, now I’m interested.
Peggy Sue Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is headed out to her 25 year high school reunion. She had married her high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicholas Cage) in something of a shotgun wedding, but the marriage is on the rocks thanks to Charlie’s infidelity. She’s taking her daughter Beth (Hunt) instead, and while I don’t know the ages of either Turner or Hunt, I don’t think they’re that far apart, but never mind. She has Peggy Sue might have some fun if Charlie stays away as promised, but he shows up anyway, and even though he avoids her, after she’s crowned queen of the reunion, she blacks out for reasons unknown. Then she wakes up as herself in 1960 at a blood drive. She has all the knowledge she has from 1985, a good year for time travel, but now she has some choices to make: should she stay with Charlie knowing full well what will happen between the two?
As it is, Charlie may be something of a big goofball, and Cage plays an excellent goofball even if I don’t quite get the voice he’s doing, he does come across as a sincere guy who doesn’t get why his girlfriend is suddenly acting funny and accusing him of things he hasn’t even come close to doing yet. Then again, most of the people Peggy Sue encounters don’t know what to make of her behavior. She has the knowledge of an adult and all that entails, like knowing how useless her high school education is going to be and how naive her friends’ ideas for the future actually are. She also has more mature ideas on sex and relationships, and that in and of itself confuses people a bit.
That actually is how the comedy for this movie works. Aside from a scene late in the movie where Peggy Sue gets some, let’s say, unusual help for her problem, this movie mostly relies on Peggy Sue being a woman in her early forties in the body of an eighteen year old, and it helps that Turner looks rather youthful no matter what scene she’s in, particularly since I don’t think they changed her appearance all that much depending on what time period she’s in. It also helps that her relationship with Cage’s Charlie is a lot more complicated than just the idea she’s mad that he will cheat on her in the future. She does find him sweet, and his attempts to launch a singing career to stay out of his family’s appliance store business make for an interesting subplot in a movie that focuses mostly on Turner’s Peggy Sue.
While not a great movie, it is an interesting look at time travel. Sure, Peggy Sue knows why her father’s purchase of an Edsel is a bad idea, but no one else does, and the fact her parents openly catch her drinking, something she isn’t even trying to hide, makes for some more fun. The movie also gets very sweet when Peggy Sue visits her grandparents, two people that are obviously long dead by 1985. This came from director Francis Ford Coppola, and my general impression of his work is if it isn’t one of the 70s Godfather movies or Apocalypse Now, it maybe wasn’t worth checking out. This movie isn’t on the level of those masterpieces, obviously, but I may need to check out more Cappola in the near future.
Grade: B
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