Francis Coppola (1986)
When Peggy Sue Bodell (née Kelcher) is named as ‘queen’ at her high school reunion (class of 1960), she’s so overcome that she faints and wakes to find herself transported back to her teenage years. Peggy Sue is aware that she’s travelled in time but her friends and family see the girl they know and are puzzled when Peggy Sue reacts with amazement to meeting them and tells them, from experience, what will happen in their future. Revisiting the past – returning to a time when you were young, your parents weren’t old and your grandparents were alive – should have considerable emotional heft but the film, although often effortfully hectic, has a heavy, unhappy spirit. It’s hard to see from the end result what Coppola (who made this in the period when he was Ford-less) saw in the screenplay by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner.
It may be unfair to blame Kathleen Turner, who plays Peggy, too harshly but the success of this fragile enterprise depends so much on the lead actress that it’s hard to resist doing so. Peggy Sue is uncomfortable in the 1960 teenager’s dress her daughter Beth has persuaded her mother to wear for the reunion. But, once she’s back in the time of her youth, it’s the actress rather than the character who seems uneasy in adolescent outfits and there’s no humour in the unease. The larger problem is that Turner is emotionally slow-moving. Someone taller but more fluid, Geena Davis say, would have worked better in the role, been more able to bring out the comedy of Peggy’s situation – as well as her youthfulness. The mid-life Peggy Sue is divorcing Charlie, who was her teenage sweetheart. Much of the action during her regression to 1960 focuses on their courtship (it seems that, because Peggy knows the marriage went wrong, we’re supposed to find this suspenseful – as if she could decide not to marry him – although the writers don’t seem to have fully worked out the what-might-have-been scheme of things). There’s a moment when the couple are out together by a moonlit lake. Peggy says, ‘I want to be a dancer!’, and Turner does a leaden twirl. She doesn’t suggest either a young, free spirit or the pathos of encroaching middle age.
It was never clear to me whether we were supposed to find Kathleen Turner believable as a teenager. Suspending disbelief about that (accepting that the people in 1960 see her as seventeen but we see her as older because we know her as someone older) turns out to be less problematic than the high-school contemporaries in Peggy Sue’s past. They also seem to be acting unconvincingly younger than their years – so there’s no real contrast with the time-travelling Peggy. Jim Carrey, twenty-four at the time, is strikingly accomplished but largely because you know what he’s going to go on to after this movie. Nicolas Cage, who was only twenty-two when the film was made, is baffling. As the young Charlie, he does a crude cartoon of adolescence – and when Charlie speaks lines like, ‘What’s the point of being a teenager if you can’t dress weird?’, Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner make him sound like an older person with a stupid, clumsy idea of the-things-kids-say (like the writers themselves, in other words). There’s nothing touching in the central romance because Cage’s Charlie is charmless – you get no sense of his being irresistible to Peggy at the time but a heartbreaking disappointment later on. What’s remarkable is that Cage is much better – more natural and engaged with the character – in his scenes as the louche Charlie (who makes a living acting in commercials etc) in his late thirties. (It’s even more remarkable that Cage gave so much more mature a performance in Raising Arizona in the same year as Peggy Sue Got Married and made Moonstruck only a year later.)
The falsity of the most of the adolescent portraits made me wonder if Coppola is aiming at something more complex than he manages to convey – whether we’re seeing the teenagers in 1960 as Peggy Sue sees them, as a mixture of who they were at the time and the people she knows they’ve turned into. Jordan Cronenweth’s lighting gives the landscape of Peggy Sue’s youth an unnatural, idealised look: is Coppola (who was twenty-one in 1960) suggesting that his generation inevitably sees this time as a golden age – or that the viewpoint of a mid-1980s film audience is filtered through intervening nostalgic American movies preoccupied with the music and cars and clothes of the period – American Graffiti, The Buddy Holly Story, even Grease? There are odd facets of the age confusion of Peggy Sue that are affecting: Helen Hunt (twenty-three at the time) seems more grown up than Kathleen Turner in the high-school reunion sequence, not just because of the latter’s too-young outfit; Barbara Harris, as Peggy’s mother, is mysteriously both younger and older than her daughter. Joan Allen as Peggy’s friend Maddy is clearly meant to have a middle-aged soul even as a teenager. But the fact that Barry Miller is credible as both the junior and senior versions of Richard, dismissed as a nerd in high school but a successful businessman years later (and the reunion ‘king’), makes you suspect that Coppola wanted the film to be convincing in a more straightforward way than it is. Except for Sofia Coppola, who has a likeable gaucheness in the small role of Peggy Sue’s younger sister, Miller is the only younger performer with charm: Richard is geeky but charm is a commodity in such short supply in this film that you’re grateful for it in any form. (There’s not that much of it in the older generations: Barbara Harris and Don Murray, as Peggy’s father, both have it; Maureen O’Sullivan, as her grandmother, signally lacks it.) The movie takes its title from a Buddy Holly song, less well-known than ‘Peggy Sue’, which is played over the opening credits. John Barry has written a score with a pleasing, plangent melody at its centre: because there’s so little emotional texture for it to support, however, Barry’s theme becomes too insistent. Peggy Sue Got Married now offers an interesting opportunity to see a range of young actors who went on to better things but the film itself is almost entirely unsuccessful.
7 October 2010
