My journey through the Coppola-family deep cuts (and also revisiting the old classics) continues. This is a bit of a lighter affair than I’m used to with FFC, but his humanity still shines.
Peggy Sue Got Married plays as an interesting counter to Back to the Future that came out the year previous—the meditation on the past is not Marty McFly’s fascination but Peggy Sue’s regret and sentimentality. She was the talk of the town and at the peak of her life in 1960, so waking up a day before her 18th birthday isn’t so much a paradox in the space time continuum but rather a return home. This is as far away from techy as you can get, recalling a time before the ‘80s science fiction boom when time travel was used as a narrative device hidden in the background rather than the centerpiece itself. Unfortunately, as I was getting used to the premise and the dynamic between Kathleen Turner’s Peggy and Nicolas Cage’s Charlie, the film seems to lose the threads it was weaving to set up an easy reconciliation between the two main characters that leaves me wanting something else. Maybe this would have worked better as a miniseries, allowing the moments of reunion to feel more deserved (Outlander, for example, deals with similar themes more successfully because it develops its character relationships at a much slower pace).
Of course, there are many moments along the way to cherish. And one can’t help but love another larger-than-life (or should I call it greater-than-life) performance from Cage. There really aren’t any other American actors that do it like Cage (at least ones that aren’t relegated to secondary roles). Such a deft mix of the tragic and the absurd. He never ceases to entertain. Peggy Sue would make a good double feature with Moonstruck.