Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

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Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Starring Joan Allen, Nicolas Cage, John Carradine, Jim Carrey, Catherine Hicks, Helen Hunt, Barry Miller, Kevin J. O'Connor, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kathleen Turner.

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During her 25th high school class reunion, middle-aged Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) tries to forget her marital problems with husband Charlie (Nicolas Cage) by renewing old friendships. Wondering if she made the right decisions in her life, Peggy Sue gets a chance to try again when, zapped into a time warp, she finds herself a teenager back in 1960. Armed with foreknowledge (the scene in which she tells off her algebra teacher is a particular treat), Peggy Sue gets to retrace the steps leading up to her unhappy marriage to high-school sweetheart Charlie. Will nerdish Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), who always carried a torch for Peggy Sue and whom she knows will become a millionaire computer mogul by 1985, win out over the unreliable Charlie this time? A "small" film from the otherwise profligate Francis Ford Coppola, Peggy Sue Got Married possesses an irresistible charm that makes up for its glaring plot deficiencies. The youthful cast is matched in its appeal by such veterans as Leon Ames, Maureen O'Sullivan and John Carradine. And yes, that is Jim Carrey as Walter Getz. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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Peggy Sue Got Married
by JimBell in JimBell Blog

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"I remember from a viewing a few years ago Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) being a fun movie with 50s rock ‘n roll, and it is, but it is also a bit more serious than I remembered. Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is recently separated from her husband and high school sweetheart (Nicholas Cage), when she goes to a high school reunion, has a heart attack, and time-travels (or is it all in her mind?) back to the crucial month of Grade 12 graduation in her all-American town in 1960. There are lots of funny bits about how someone from 25 years in the future and 25 years older sees her mother and father and the high school scene. But her serious intent is to discourage her sweetheart so that she doesn’t get married to him and then doesn’t get divorced from him. This is difficult to do because she finds him quite attractive even though she knows all the faults he has and will have. This movie was not the straight-forward romp I remembered; it was more complex and less pat, epitom ... " [More]

Review by All Movie Guide

All Movie Guide

liked it.

Francis Ford Coppola took a comic break after The Godfather movies and several smaller films to direct this gently manic twist on such 1960s-era nostalgia movies as American Graffitti. Kathleen Turner plays an unhappily married woman who falls asleep at her 25th high school reunion and wakes up to find out she has re-entered her teen years and has a chance to remake her woeful life. It's a madcap time-travel movie in which Coppola seems to be searching for a consistent tone, mixing melodrama and comedy with hints of tragedy. His nephew Nicolas Cage excels in his third role in a Coppola film, on the verge of his breakthrough in Moonstruck. Turner was Oscar-nominated, but the film was a commercial disappointment, and critics seemed uncomfortable to see a director of Coppola's stature fiddling around with such relatively mundane material. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

Tags: nostalgia , timetravel , fifties , lifechoices , reunion
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