A year after Back to the Future, director Francis Ford Coppola—working from a script by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner—gave us a less inventive yet equally moving time-travel meditation on aging. In Peggy Sue Got Married, a surprisingly vulnerable Kathleen Turner plays the title character, who passes out at her high-school reunion only to wake up in 1960, her senior year. This is handsomely made (cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lights the reunion as if it were already part of some magical realm), but what lingers about the movie are the quieter, actorly moments: Peggy eager to play board games with her younger sister (Sofia Coppola), whom she lost touch with as an adult; Peggy breathlessly looking at her mother (Barbara Harris) and saying, “Mom, I forgot you were ever this young;” Peggy picking up the phone to hear her grandmother’s voice on the other end, when her grandmother should be dead. Foremost among the familiar faces in the supporting cast is Nicolas Cage as Charlie Bodell, Peggy’s high-school sweetheart, whom she’s on the verge of divorcing at the reunion. Despite a distractingly whiny voice that doesn’t connect with what is supposed to be a cool character, Cage manages to tap into enough tenderness to make the romantic angle work just well enough.
(4/19/2022)
