Things didn’t quite turn out well for Peggy Sue. She spent most of her teen years alienating her parents, and running around with Francis Ford Coppola’s creepy nephew, and grew up to be a very bitter divorcee whose only good friendship is with her daughter. Now appearing at a high school reunion, she has to face her old friends and her ex-husband who is now a creepy business man. After collapsing at the reunion, Peggy Sue awakens to find herself a teenager once again.
Now with a second chance, and unsure how she warped back in time, she tries desperately to undo much of her mistakes. Which include falling for the creepy high schooler Charlie, opting out of marriage, and looking for love in the right places. Coppola offers audiences his own time travel movie set in the sixties, except Peggy Sue has an active role in how it changes. Meanwhile she avoids all the trivialities of being a teen and tries to figure out how to turn the timeline to her advantage while also attempting to figure out how she was able to go back in to time. Lacking the stamps of Coppola, “Peggy Sue Got Married” is a fluffy and vanilla romance comedy that thrives on nostalgia. Not just in the fun of the sixties but in the lies that much of its youth believed. Peggy Sue is a bitter middle aged woman who goes back to being a selfish and vain teenager in her ideal decade.
Kathleen Turner gives a marvelous performance as Peggy Sue Bodell who seems cautious that she’s on borrowed time, and tries her best to use it to not only ensure that her life turn out better, but that she’s able to appreciate the things in her life she was too self-centered to. One of the better moments involve Peggy hearing her grandmother on the phone and running off heartbroken, filled with the knowledge she’d die years later, but begging her mother to re-assure her that she’s doing well at that current year. Intentional or not, Nicolas Cage’s performance is abysmal, and most times he’s just an embarrassing element in a story that should have been much more dramatic.
Cage’s presence offsets the attempted melancholy time travel tale, and turns the proceedings in to a cartoon whenever he’s on-screen trying to convince us of his suave demeanor. “Peggy Sue Got Married” touches upon the common mistake about nostalgia, and how what we remember is often different than from what we actually experienced. Often times we walked through our life failing to appreciate certain points, and spending time wasting our lives. Is it possible to re-write history or is fate a path already set for us? Maybe instead of focusing on mistakes of the past, it’s best to try to keep from making mistakes in the future. “Peggy Sue Got Married” is no masterpiece, but it at least imparts an important perspective about nostalgia. The Blu-Ray release comes with no features.