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?

Three Films Make A Post: They dare to climb a terrifying new peak in suspense... all the way up to hell!

Where Eagles Dare (1968): For quite a few people, this war adventure directed by Brian G. Hutton and written by Alistair MacLean is a bit of a classic of men’s adventure cinema. I’ve never seen that in the film, and a recent re-watch unfortunately did not improve my impression. Mostly, the film feels bloated beyond all comprehension, taking up two and a half hours of one’s time for a series of plot twists and improbable plans that makes the most of our contemporary blockbusters look downright sane. Brian G. Hutton’s direction is bland, wasting many a theoretically cool set piece through tedious pacing, the script just goes on and on about everything, and the cast, well…This is as bland a performance as you’ll encounter by Clint Eastwood, and Richard Burton does his usual Richard Burton slumming thing that just doesn’t do it for me, just longer, in this case.

Falcon’s Gold aka Robbers of the Sacred Mountain (1982): I have a lot of room in my heart for Indiana Jones knock-offs (particularly of the Italian persuasion) but this cable TV movie – ergo, breasts – which is the understandably only directing credit for one Bob Schulz, really doesn’t even seem to try to grasp for an adventuring crown forever out of its reach. Instead of cheap thrills and silly ideas, we get Simon MacCorkindale making rubber faces that must go for human expressions on his planet, atrocious editing that ruins the few moments of theoretical excitement the film has on offer, and a script that doesn’t actually manage to hit even the simplest adventure movie tropes decently but does find space to include a pretty problematic “romance” between MacCorkindale and a character we first meet wearing her school uniform. Though, to be fair to the nudity does come not from her.

Romancing the Stone (1984): It is of course a bit unfair to compare a cheap TV movie to a decently budgeted studio production like Robert Zemeckis’s adventure romance with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, but still, this one shows how to trot classical adventure movie paths well. And thanks to its organic mix of slightly updated romance tropes and a lot of very well done adventure stuff, it doesn’t feel like much of an attempt to catch that Indiana Jones money at all, but rather like what it is: a film inspired by many of the same sources as Lucas and Spielberg that goes its own, frequently funny, always crowd-pleasing and very fun way from there. Diane Thomas’s script mostly manages the difficult task of having her heroine grow and finding that big roguish love without the latter destroying the former fantastically well; that Turner and Douglas where both in a phase where they could do little wrong certainly helps here too.


The film is also perfectly paced, looks and just feels fantastic thanks to Zemeckis and photography by the great Dean Cundey. Sure, one might complain this is film as candy, but when it’s as good as any candy you’ll get your hands on, who’s going to?

In short: Serial Mom (1984)

 In all honesty, I’ve never been much of a fan of John Waters’s films. I find the campy shock the squares side of cult movies the man operates in generally not terribly interesting – perhaps because I might be square but I’m mostly not shocked by it and really don’t relate to the approach much. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy Waters exists and makes films, mind you, for while his stuff may usually not be my jam, it clearly is his, and last time I looked, directors following their personal obsessions and interests is how it should be. Serial Mom, however, does work for me quite well.

This serial killer comedy about a murderous suburban house wife played by Kathleen Turner is one of the films that came to pass when Waters somehow got the opportunity to work with actual Hollywood money. I can’t see that happening today, or rather, they’d probably try to get Waters to make a (serious) superhero movie. As it stands, Waters made great use of his budget, not just by hiring a cast of slightly higher profile actors than his usual posse (though some of them are in here too). Most impressive is how good the film looks. Waters is clearly putting to work everything he learned when making independent films to create a so-healthy-it-is-sickly (until it turns out it is actually sick) kind of suburban paradise/freak show that’s so bright and tasteless it is only natural it exclusively harbours people as unhinged as everyone in here is. As a satire, this is of course incredibly on the nose, but being unsubtle is one of the things Waters is clearly about, and here he is so imaginative in the escalation of, well, everything, that the unsubtle business filling the film can still be surprising.

The film also happens to contain one of the career best performances of Kathleen Turner. It may not be a nuanced one but then a nuanced performance would rather be missing the point, for what Turner needs to do is throw herself into every craziness, every indignity and every tasteless joke and own it completely, seeing as she’s not supposed to portray an actual human being but the over-the-top peak of everything that’s frightening (and kinda seductive) about suburban life, serial killers and the society that birthed them Waters is so lovingly skewering here. Which she does with such energy and conviction, with a complete lack of vanity she could probably have carried the film alone even if Waters hadn’t been as at the top of his game as he is here.