PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED: Blu-ray (Tri-Star Pictures, 1986) Image/RJL Entertainement

Time travel has always held a certain fascination for mankind, the ability to pinpoint and then go back to remedy, alter or merely begin our lives anew, but with our youth and vitality restored, and, a more intuitive understanding of the choices previously made still firmly imbedded in our minds.  The ‘road not taken’ has its perennial appeal, primarily because, no matter the set of circumstances, the grass always seems to be greener on the other side of that proverbial fence. Science has been rather circumspect about its own theories regarding the ‘space/time’ continuum, while the writers and the poets have had their way indulging a more romanticized view: everything from ancient Hindu mysticism to Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Dicken’s A Christmas Carol satisfying our need to revisit the past in order to rectify its inevitable misfires. In totem, literature’s address of time travel has largely revolved around an even more impossible human desire - to stave off the inevitable aging process and death, perhaps by entering the world of a Lewis Carroll where everyone can live forever. Thus, I have a sneaking suspicion, if director, Francis Ford Coppola could go back in time, he likely would choose 1980 as his point of embarkation, to re-think his film output from that tie-dyed/dayglow decade.

Indeed, Coppola – one of the irrefutable bright and shining master craftsmen of the seventies, found the seismic shift in cultural tastes that came upon the eighties a much tougher nut to crack.  Beginning with his Oscar-winning opus magnum, Apocalypse Now (1979) – a highly troubled production that nevertheless yielded a masterpiece, Coppola was to dive headstrong and heart-sure into a string of calculated misfires, not entirely his doing; the ironically joyless, One From the Heart (1982, a musical atrocity by any barometer one might choose to measure it), and, The Cotton Club (1984), ruthlessly butchered by executives at Orion Pictures. This was supposed to be a musical, but wound up being a truncated drama. To be sure, there was more profitable fare poured into Coppola’s 80’s mix. The Outsiders (1983) for one. But its minor flourish did little to slow the niggling opinion by many, Coppola – once considered the ‘cutting edge’ go-to in the picture biz, had now slipped in status as a tired old warhorse, fit for the pasture; an opinion hastened by the release of his intelligently-made, but little seen biopic, Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). This nearly crippled Coppola’s ability to do better work elsewhere and later on, well beyond the profitable release of The Godfather: Part III (1990). However, two years before ‘Tucker’, Coppola made another picture, assuming the reins from a beleaguered Penny Marshall.

While Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) proved Coppola still had it, becoming a sizable hit for Tri-Star with Oscar nods to boot, it remains something less of a passion project, and very much representative of Coppola’s fastidious, work-a-day investment to will a competent effort from an awkwardly structured time travel fantasy flick. Peggy Sue Got Married is all about second chances. Its protagonist is a seemingly ageless divorcée who suffers a massive heart attack at her high school reunion and is then magically teleported back to her senior year in high school circa 1960.  The Jerry Leichtling/Arlene Sarner screenplay is rather unevenly paced – setting up its premise in earnest, but introducing far too many characters in the present, some entirely jettisoned after our regression into Peggy Sue’s (Kathleen Turner) past. The most glaring omission is Rosalie Testa (Lucinda Jenney), introduced as one of the coordinators of the reunion, paralyzed and wheelchair bound. Yet after a tender embrace from the star of our show, Rosalie virtually disappears from this story. We never see her in the past, nor do we learn of the circumstances by which she came to be disabled. Arguably, Rosalie isn’t the focus of our story, but then why such a prominent introduction? The screenplay also jettisons more meaningful interactions between Peggy Sue and her two best friends, Carol Heath (Catherine Hicks) and Maddy Nagle (Joan Allen) almost from the moment Peggy Sue awakens from her haze at the 1960 blood drive and is driven home by Maddy and Carol, each infrequently reappearing thereafter throughout the rest of the story.

This leaves the picture’s modus operandi as a not terribly efficacious bit of regression therapy for our central protagonist. Arguably, given the opportunity to change her past and make her future better, Peggy Sue willingly choses to follow a destiny she already knows belongs to her; namely, to become Charlie Bodell’s (Nicholas Cage) wife. It’s a stiff-necked scenario at best, Peggy Sue’s preliminary aspirations to rewrite her history, inexplicably, morphing along the way to a careworn acquiescence of her fate. So, what exactly is Coppola offering us here? An opportunity for a brief reprieve from ourselves and a respite leading to the same ‘dead end’ conclusion, or, as C.S. Lewis more astutely hypothesized, “You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” Peggy Sue’s logic is superficially explained away by a locket given to her by Charlie, since to contain baby pictures of the couple’s now adult children who will cease to exist if Peggy Sue does not follow through and relive her past verbatim. Yet Peggy Sue begins her journey with an ingrained defiance to live her life differently. She confides her time travel experience to the only man in the past she believes will be able to appreciate her situation - Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), a brilliant physicist in the present, yet regarded as little more than an anti-social geek in high school. Naturally, Richard is skeptical at first, believing he is part of an elaborate practical joke to mock his intelligence. Gradually, however, Peggy Sue manages to convince Richard she is telling the truth – or, at least…the truth as she perceives it.

The first half of Peggy Sue Got Married is all about wish-fulfillment. Having endured the bitter decline and break up of her marriage in the present, Peggy Sue Kelcher is afforded the opportunity to travel back to the moment when she made her decision to wed high school sweetheart, Charlie Bodell – forever shaping the course of her destiny as a wife and mother. At the reunion, we hear Peggy Sue affectionately waxing about her school girl’s infatuation for Michal Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), the dark and brooding rebel back in the day with aspirations of becoming a writer. Unable to locate Michael and send him an invitation for this reunion, Peggy Sue is left to her rose-colored recollections of Fitzsimmons as a mysterious figure - the only boy she wished to have taken to bed. This sets up the other premise in Coppola’s movie - that the past is never quite as rosy as we remember it. For upon her sojourn to this imperfect yesteryear, Peggy Sue discovers the Michael she perceived and the one who actually existed are not one in the same. Michael is unstable and odd to say the least - and very full of himself, with a queer angst bordering on self-pity. He’s the ‘bad boy’ that got away - his recreational use of marijuana and alcohol, once perceived by Peggy Sue with a bold and sexual dangerousness, now seems thoroughly misguided as his desire for a polygamous relationship to include Peggy Sue as she supports him on a pig farm in Utah. No, it just won’t work. At least, not in the way Peggy Sue once imagined that it might have.

Of course, the real problem with Coppola’s movie is that it runs amok with the precepts of the space/time continuum to ever be taken as anything more than a Hollywood fantasy of factual research science has committed to our limited understanding of the concept of time travel itself – if any such understanding is even possible in the first place. Peggy Sue’s confessions to Richard in the past ought to alter both their futures at a faster rate. They do not. At one point, Richard deduces if Peggy Sue is, as she claims to be, from the future, then she can stand in front of a fire engine racing down the street because it will pass through her, as she has no solid form beyond the strangely concrete one Richard is able to drag into the street and place directly in harm’s way. Unable to go through with the ‘experiment’, Peggy Sue and Richard begin their investigation into time travel instead. This, however, makes no sense – because learning the secrets to events yet to have taken place should also afford Richard the opportunity to manipulate them to his advantage and thus alter not only his future, but everyone else’s too.

The first two-thirds of Coppola’s movie is marginally successful at recapturing the anxiety and wonderment of revisiting one’s past some twenty-five years removed from it. Peggy Sue is reunited with her parents (Barbara Harris and Don Murray), her estranged sister, Nancy (Sophia Coppola) and finally, her devoted grandparents, Elizabeth (Maureen O’Sullivan) and Barney (Leon Ames) to whom Peggy also eventually confides her secret and is wholly embraced, understood and even supported in her fervent desire to return to the present where her now adult children, Scott (who we never see) and Beth (Helen Hunt) await. Regrettably, the last act of Peggy Sue Got Married is a narrative disaster, one that all but implodes under Coppola’s weighty mismanagement. Peggy Sue is taken to Barney’s moose lodge in a vain attempt to teleport her back to her own time. The lodge’s grand poobah, Leo (John Carradine) invokes an ancient ritual – presumably, the picture’s Wizard of Oz moment, with spookily lit incantations taking the placing of ruby slippers, heels a-clickin’. Lights flicker and dim. Thunder crashes. But it all culminates with Charlie turning out the lights and kidnapping Peggy Sue to a nearby greenhouse where he proposes marriage during a violent thunderstorm. Charlie is momentarily rejected. But in presenting Peggy Sue with the locket, she has long since carried cherished photos of her children, Charlie effectively weakens her resolve, enough to allow him his moment of impregnation, thus to return Peggy Sue to the only future where she truly belongs. This ending is a genuine downer. Peggy Sue awakens in an impossibly homey and impractical hospital room with Charlie and Beth at her bedside, praying for her return. Charlie confesses his midlife crisis – and the affair it spawned – have come to an end. He suddenly realizes how much he is still in love with Peggy Sue. She briefly resists his advances, but then seemingly forgives him his indiscretions, even inviting him over for Sunday dinner. Given that Peggy Sue has just been revived from a near death experience she looks remarkably healthy. No tubes – not even an intravenous drip – and having instant recall regarding the moment of her return to the present.

Coppola’s attempt at a Wizard of Oz-esque finale doesn’t really work because unlike the aforementioned 1939 classic, his protagonist has not magically returned from some fanciful hallucination of a kingdom over the rainbow, but her own distant past that is not a dream at all – a past she attempted to – but was unsuccessful in altering. Was it all just a dream? Coppola’s finale seems to suggest as much. Yet, in claiming the dream cop-out, Coppola utterly deflates both the premise and the purpose of all that has gone before it – namely to prove to his protagonist, as well as the audience, “you can’t go home again” or – perhaps – can, but are doomed to repeat your mistakes even when given hindsight and every opportunity to do it all differently. So, what was the point of Peggy Sue’s imaginary time travel? Was it to discover for herself that she was already living in a fool’s paradise? This, the audience already knows from Peggy Sue’s recollections at the reunion. We didn’t need two-hours of period drama and intermittent screwball comedy to reiterate this point. In the end, Peggy Sue Got Married is an oddity, one that occasionally contains some very charming vignettes - particularly the moment when Peggy Sue proudly warbles ‘My Country T’is of Thee’ with hand over heart and a renewed sense for the meaning in its lyrics  – the latter, a bygone ritual in the public school system – or when she tells her stuffy algebra teacher, Mr. Snellgrove (Ken Grantham) she happens to know she will have absolutely no use for his courseware in the future. These are quaint and expertly staged bits of introspection that only a tale about time travel can tell convincingly.

Yet, on the whole Coppola’s direction here is uninspired. He also has trouble breaking into the past regression narrative.  The present-day high school reunion is bedecked in shiny silver mylar balloons to perfectly compliment Peggy Sue’s shimmering silver poodle skirt – much more a creation derived from eighties’ super-kitsch than vintage fifties’ lace and crinoline. When Peggy Sue awakens in the past, she is still wearing this same dress, a distinct clash set against Theodora Van Runkle’s otherwise impeccable fifties’ apparel recreations. Escorted by Maddy and Carol down an abandoned hallway, Peggy glimpses one of the mylar balloons from the reunion eerily drifting away from her. But exactly why it should have made this time-traveling transition along with our heroine is anybody’s guess. Ostensibly, it has something to do with Coppola’s attempt to illustrate a spooky convergence between the present and past, fast diverging from one another. On the ride home, Maddy and Carol curiously eye Peggy Sue, understandably perplexed by her bewilderment as they drive past a presumably familiar downtown core populated by clean-cut pedestrians and vintage automobiles. Yet, Coppola’s shots of this recreated cityscape are rather limited, no period billboards or glimpses of archetypal shop windows (a la, say Back to the Future 1985) to complete the effect, presumably because the budget for Dean Tavoularis’ production design just wasn’t there.  Instead, we get a very brief and thoroughly perplexing insert of a clock tower. 

Thankfully, most of Tavoularis’ work does manage to recapture this lost era of Americana, in part due to Jordan Cronenweth’s lush and moderately diffused cinematography. This favors the palette of 50’s pastiche pastels. It also helps to have such stellar performers as Leon Ames, Maureen O’Sullivan, Barbara Harris and Don Murray added into the mix, all alumni from Hollywood’s classical period, who lived through and beyond its diminishing era and recall its wide-eyed optimism. Regrettably, Nicholas Cage and Kathleen Turner are very ‘of the moment’ – that moment, being the 1980’s. Cage is an ill-fit in particular. He just seems unable to assimilate into period. His costumes wear him, not the other way around. Turner is a tad more convincing, but her infrequent lapses into mannerisms that could only have come from the present diffuse her performance and make it less convincing as the story wears on. And it does, regrettably wear on, the last act indulging far too much in mysticism and the occult – concepts readily obscure of at the cusp of the 1960’s, readily suppressed within Eisenhower’s idyllic myth of suburbia. It is inconceivable Peggy Sue’s grandparents would embrace her theory of time travel – they having come from an even more distant generation ensconced in turn-of-the-last-century pragmatism, rather than the jet-propulsion promises of an as-yet-unrealized space age.

In the final analysis, Peggy Sue Got Married doesn’t really work. Superficially, it occasionally fulfills our collective fascination with time travel. But on the whole the story remains a perplexing convolution of half-baked ideas with zero pragmatism, even within the precepts of time travel itself. Coppola and his screenplay veer too wildly in and out of the fanciful, the actors playing to the set-pieces and gags rather than the totality of the plot. By contrast, in Robert Zemekis’ Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly astutely informs the audience he thinks he is losing his mind. In Peggy Sue Got Married, Kathleen Turner merely suggests she has slipped into some purgatory-inspired/death-induced hallucination and/or coma. As such, all bets for what follows are off, with Coppola occasionally revealing storytelling insecurities lurking behind his ‘anything goes’ premise. Unfortunately, Coppola has forgotten, within this fantasy framework he needs to do far more than merely maintain a certain air of believability, more than fill the eye of his camera with a rose-tinted retrospective for the way things, arguably, never were and thus, can never be again. He needed to anchor his movie in a truthful reflection. Despite his best efforts, much of Peggy Sue merely plays as slick and stylish, pretty pictures, minus this unerring sense of verisimilitude.

Peggy Sue Got Married makes its way to Blu-ray via Image/RJL Entertainment. The movie was made for Columbia Pictures via its Tri-Star label. So, Sony Home Entertainment remain the custodians of Coppola’s film. Shot by the late Jordan Cronenweth, much of the picture’s stylized cinematography seems anemic on Blu-ray, with sequences shot in 1985 possessing a heavy, gauze-filtered/color subdued appearance, contrasted with a more pronounced palette and slightly blown out contrast for the 1960’s body of the film. Owing to Sony’s due diligence, even when farming out its product to third-party distributors, this 1080p transfer is smartly turned out with a single caveat to consider. The image, in totem, appears softer than I believe it ought, even to satisfy Cronenweth’s use of diffusion filters. The opening credits are undeniably very soft with muted colors and undue thickness in film grain. Otherwise, it doesn’t appear as if any artificial edge enhancement has been applied. There is no black crush during the night scenes, and contrast is on point as well. Owing to its release some time ago, bit rate is not exactly high, and the mastering has been done on a BD-25, rather than a BD-50. I believe Peggy Sue would highly benefit from a new 4K scan from original elements.  This offering just seems dated – more so than its original vintage would apply. The movie’s original mono sports a new 5.1 DTS that is cautious in its spatial separations and mostly frontal for dialogue and effects. Performances by the Marshall Crenshaw Band, Charlie and his buddies, and John Barry’s underscore are the true benefactors here. Tragically, there are no extras. Bottom line: I have begun to look back on the movies that, for better or worse, have stayed with me throughout the years. While hardly indicative of Coppola’s best work, Peggy Sue Got Married has remained in my mind ever since I first saw it theatrically. Good movies will do that. Bad movies, occasionally too. While I don’t believe this movie falls into this latter category, there remains something distinctly flawed about it. Sometimes, time mellows such perceptions, rife for reassessment and reconsideration…but not in this case. Regrets.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

0