Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Kathleen Turner, Nicolas Cage, Kevin J. O’Connor, Barry Miller, Catherine Hicks, Lisa Jane Persky, Don Murray, Jim Carrey, Barbara Harris, Joan Allen, Lucinda Jenney, Wil Shriner, Helen Hunt. [PG-13]

Turner’s remarkable (and remarkably subtle) performance is the reason to see this wistful, nostalgic venture into a middle-aged woman’s past. She’s Peggy, and she’s in her forties and attending her 25-year high school reunion when she becomes overwhelmed with the gravity of her life choices (including a failed marriage to high school sweetheart Cage) and faints, only to wake up in the body of her 17-year-old self way back in 1960. Not to be confused with a reverse-Back to the Future dilemma—for one, this project is more philosophical and far less clever and exciting—it’s a filmgoing experience marked with strong emotional discoveries and overemphasized sentimentality, where it has a warm feel and transient delights but a confused prevailing attitude and a sluggish tempo where rheumy reflections replace the great insight that viewers ought to be craving. Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner’s screenplay becomes distracted by the apparatus of its time travel plot device when it would have been better to just treat the situation as pure dream-like fantasy, but at least they’re capable of temporarily fooling the audience into overlooking the foregone conclusion. While Turner is terrific, her frequent scene partner isn’t, and it must have been difficult to play opposite Cage’s off-putting nasal delivery and sketchy upheavals (he has an emotional breakdown that echoes of Eric Roberts from Pope of Greenwich Village). John Carradine has a small role in his final legitimate film appearance.

66/100