The Travolta/Cage Project #15: Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Name a more iconic duo!

I vividly remember first experiencing Nicolas Cage as an actor back in 1986 watching Francis Ford Coppola’s wistful meditation on age, mortality and regret Peggy Sue Got Married with my family as a ten-year-old boy. I recall thinking of Cage’s performance, “Who is that man, what is he doing, and why isn’t anyone stopping him?” 

I was not alone in that line of thinking. In Peggy Sue Got Married, a way too young Cage delivers a performance so big it threatens to block out the sun. It’s a star-unmaking turn full of choices that are bold, audacious and borderline insane.

Cage plays teen space cadet turned tacky TV pitchman Charlie Bodell as a big pompadoured Doo Wop doofus with a head full of bad ideas and a body wracked with adolescent hormonal madness and a nasal whine that feels alternately like a trick or an affectation. He’s a bizarre cross between James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Eddie Deezen who seems to be in a different movie than just about everyone else in the cast with the exception of a young Jim Carrey, who similarly burns with an energy and intensity too bold for this kind of gentle fare. 

Cage wasn’t a big enough star at the time of Peggy Sue Got Married’s release to get away with a performance quite that big. At this point in his still young career, Cage was expected to serve the movies he was in, to modulate his performance to meet the demands of the material yet he brings the crazy here in industrial amounts, sometimes overwhelming the film’s fragile alchemy. 

A sentimental, distaff answer to the previous year’s blockbuster time travel comedy Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married casts an Oscar-nominated Kathleen Turner as its title character, a forty-three year old who attends her 25th high school reunion with daughter Beth (Helen Hunt) rather than her estranged husband Charlie (Cage) because they’re separated. 

For reasons known only to Coppola, he casts Hunt as Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage’s daughter despite Hunt being a mere nine years younger than Turner and a year OLDER than Nicolas Cage. 

That’s right: Cage is younger than the actress playing his onscreen daughter and a solid decade younger than his leading lady, which never stops being distracting. At the reunion Peggy Sue faints and wakes up in 1960 and finds herself inside her eighteen year old body at a pivotal time in her life: a few weeks before losing her virginity and getting pregnant by Charlie, something that irrevocably shapes her future and ties her inexorably to a bizarre man-child who doesn’t just seem to be screamingly wrong for her as a husband and father to her child; he just seems wrong in general, on an almost existential level. 

Transported back into her teen body, but blessed and cursed with her forty-something brain Peggy Sue is at first completely overwhelmed. It’s almost too much for her to bear. She needs to get a little drunk just to be able to handle it. The implications are staggering. Her dead grandparents are alive, seemingly as close as the nearest phone. Assuming that she’s not just suffering some manner of head injury-induced fantasy, Peggy Sue has been given a giant cosmic do-over, an opportunity to do it all over again, and to get it right this time. Peggy Sue has an opportunity to unmake the mistakes of the past, beginning with the philandering goober she built what appears to be a pretty okay life with.

The overwhelming and often genuinely affecting sentimentality of Peggy Sue Got Married really makes you appreciate how Robert Zemeckis took similar subject matter and made a movie that wasn’t just non-sentimental but violently anti-sentimental. 

Back to the Future never gave us time or space to really ponder the larger emotional and metaphysical ramifications of its premise, lest the melancholy and sadness get in the way of the perfectly-tuned hilarity. Peggy Sue Got Married, in sharp contrast, is continually affording Peggy Sue, and by extension the audience, the opportunity to engage with the heavy emotions at the center of the story, whether through the heroine’s profound ambivalence about Charlie and his role in her life or her opportunity to hang out with her dead grandparents one last time.

Peggy Sue uses her great cosmic do-over to contemplate alternate paths and kiss cute boys other than her husband, most notably Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), the high school’s resident beatnik, a moody, black clad hunk prone to crackpot philosophizing and extemporaneous poetry. 

Peggy Sue rides on the bad boy’s bike and smokes weed and ponders what life would be like with someone other than Charlie but Michael’s vision of a radical and revolutionary future—where he presides over a small harem that supports him financially while he writes—promises freedom from convention and rules but ultimately just looks like an artsier, more bohemian form of servitude and masochistic self-sacrifice. 

Then there’s Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), the class brain, a future millionaire and entrepreneur who Peggy Sue tells about her status as a time-traveler, in part so that they can hatch schemes to use her unique knowledge to become rich and powerful beyond their wildest dreams. Richard and Peggy Sue have tremendous chemistry as friends but the heart wants what it wants. 

In Peggy Sue’s case, that’s Charlie, who she can’t quite quit or give up despite the knowledge that their future together will be rocky, he will prove unfaithful and, as the film begins, they will be deep into the unfathomably complicated, intense and painful legal and practical process of splitting a married couple with children into two single parents. 

There’s a powerful ambivalence at the heart of Peggy Sue Got Married. Peggy Sue and the film are forever wavering in their feelings about Charlie as not just an element of Peggy Sue’s future but pretty much her entire future. He’s such an overbearing and overwhelming figure that he sucks up all the oxygen in the room; he seems incapable of treating a partner as an equal. Seemingly the best he’s capable of is offering Peggy Sue a life in his outsized, obnoxious shadow. And frankly, she’s just too goddamn good for that, even if the film, like Peggy Sue, can’t seem to envision a future for her other than by this creep’s side. 

I don’t know whether that represents a failure of imagination on the filmmakers’ part or an acknowledgment that the lives of women of Peggy Sue’s generation were dictated in no small part by the careers and demands of their husbands and the institutional and deeply personal sexism of the time. 

It doesn’t really matter what Peggy Sue does. She’s seemingly doomed to an impossible relationship with a selfish, narcissistic man-child, albeit with a certain bonkers charm. Charlie was seemingly written as a question mark and a human Rorschach blot; we’re never quite supposed to be sure how we feel about him at any given time. In that respect the movie sometimes recalls a Twilight Zone rom-com version of the notorious Ladies Home Journal column “Can This Marriage be Saved?” 

When Peggy Sue interacts with her future husband in the 1960 portion of the film she’s doing so with the mind of a 43 year old mother and wife with an adult child in her twenties while he is an almost impressively immature eighteen year old with the mind of 12 year old boy who has been huffing paint and mainlining Pixie Stix.

Peggy Sue consequently relates to her future husband in 1960 as if he is an oddly endearing but frustrating and incredibly annoying child she must deal with rather than a soulmate or an equal. Casting a twenty-four year old actor as a forty-three year old AND an eighteen year old only adds to the weird sense that Peggy Sue Got Married is, on some level, a rom-com about a grown woman finding the patience and grace to forgive and accept the emotionally stunted, possibly psychotic boy-child she will eventually marry.  

That Peggy Sue Got Married works emotionally despite Cage’s bizarre miscasting and distractingly broad, theatrical yet oddly hypnotic performance is a testament largely to the craft and artistry Coppola and his gifted collaborators bring to the film and to Turner’s lovely and multi-dimensional performance, which works despite her complete lack of chemistry with Cage, who she unsurprisingly hated in real life. 

In her memoir Turner accused Cage of getting arrested for drunk driving multiple times and stealing a chihuahua. Cage sued and Turner publicly admitted that Cage never stole a chihuahua but you’ve got to admit: that totally DOES seem exactly like the kind of thing Nicolas Cage would do, particularly in the mid-1980s, when small dog thievery was the hottest celebrity fad. 

Despite its occasionally sticky sentimentality, Peggy Sue Got Married soft-sells the ultimate reason Peggy Sue can’t, or won’t, undo her destiny by giving her jerky hubby the pre-emptive heave-ho: her children would not exist in that scenario and if you’re any kind of a parent, your children are the greatest and most important and essential part of your life. I know I would never undo any of the mistakes I’ve made if it meant I wouldn’t have Declan and Harris. 

I was way too young for Peggy Sue Got Married the first time around as a ten year old in the theater. I’m the perfect age for it now but I still can’t say whether I was moved by the movie despite Cage’s performance by the movie or because of it. He’s a real wild card in a movie that doesn’t quite know what to do with him except watch in equal parts mortification and amazement as he works his peculiar magic.

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