So, you wake up from fainting 25 years earlier in your life, in your teenaged body, but you still have all the memories and life experiences you faced in those subsequent years. What would you do differently??? if you're ME, you still marry the guy cuz it's been a great life with him, but there are people i'd have been nicer to, and would have stood up for myself (and others) much more. but that's me...But Peggy Sue hasn't had a great life, and her husband hasn't been faithful. Now going thru a divorce as the adult, she's finds herself back with her husband when he was just a kid and trying so hard to make her love him. She doesn't want to have the same miserable life with him she's known, but in the end, she realizes that to boot him from her teenage life, she also boots the two kids she had with him, and she's not willing to do that.I love everything about this movie. i love the performances, and the cinematography. The music by John Barry sets the tone, and it tugs at the heartstrings every time. I love that grown-up Peggy now understands how better to treat people she dissed in her selfish youth, and stands up for those who are weak when confronted by bullies. Those are the kinds of things I would try to correct if i could have a do-over with my senior year in high school. I wouldn't be one of the sheep Michael Fitzpatrick talks about. Being a mother, I'd want to protect the kids who were bullied.I loved that the old guys at the lodge just happened to have a ritual to send her back to her time, and no one (but her grandfather) seemed astonished that it actually seemed to work.The one, teeny weeny issue i always think about is, if her peers (Michael, Richard Norvick) could "remember" this "different" Peggy and how she impacted their lives, why not her grandparents? wouldn't they have mentioned it to her, at some point in her life, that she had talked to them about time traveling when she went to visit them that night? She only told Richard and her grandparents that she'd come from the future---Richard, while not openly saying so, certainly had more of a relationship with her than when they were in school. Michael, who is only seen in 1960, still makes it apparent that they spent time together in her second go-round. And she told her grandparents....but they don't mention it again, apparently. ah, the paradox of time travel.

It's Peggy Sue's 25 high school reunion and what started as a dream marriage to high school sweetheart Nicholas Cage has gone sour with his infidelity. The two are getting divorced and attend separately. But an accident as Kathleen Turner is accepting her reunion queen crown knocks her unconscious and she's transported back to her high school days with all the folks she's enjoying happy and unhappy memories.Coming right down to it Peggy Sue Got Married is a combination of The Wizard Of Oz and It's A Wonderful Life. All three films involve transportation to alternate universes for the protagonists. All three films have the same moral, that there's no place like home.Kathleen Turner got her career role and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in Peggy Sue Got Married. You believe her both as middle age woman and teenager who's in love, but retains all her memories of her future and now is questioning what she did, did she make the right life choices. A whole lot like George Bailey. Other performances I enjoyed were that of Barry Miller who became a famous scientist, but was the school nerd in the day and Kevin O'Connor as the beatnik rebel who gives the English teacher hell for liking Hemingway over Kerouac.Three survivors of Hollywood's Golden Age gave some great performances. Leon Ames and Maureen O'Sullivan as her maternal grandparents. And John Carradine who was doing mostly Grade Z horror flicks at the time was great in a role as the Grand Poobah of Ames's lodge. Love those incantations he was giving. A great role to chew the scenery and look normal doing it.Peggy Sue Got Married also got Oscar nominations for Cinematography and Costume Design. It's great viewing and a whole ensemble cast does some really fabulous work.

From the same mind that brought audiences the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and Tucker: The Man and His Dream, comes the stylistically similar Francis Ford Coppola film, Peggy Sue Got Married. Telling the story of a woman on the edge, Peggy Sue, and her high school reunion, Peggy Sue Got Married proves a nice time portal for all of us to walk through and meet our former selves. Not many things bring back such pure unrelenting nostalgia like one's senior year of high school. The transformative stage in which we are discovering who we are and who we want to become is purely illustrated in this Coppola film.Dreading going to her 25th reunion occurring in the midst of her separation from her high school sweetheart due to infidelity, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) dons a dress reminiscent of the type of dress she would have worn all those years ago. Returning to the reunion as only half of the class couple proved daunting for Peggy. After wading through the subtleties, a few of her former friends asked outright about her absent husband, Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage). Depressed, and somewhat longing, Peggy goes through the proceedings of the reunion. After catching up with her well-intentioned former best friends, Catherine Hicks (Carol Heath) and Rosalie Testa (Lucinda Jenney), Peggy remains disconnected and starts to question all that didn't happen in her life. After being named class queen; Peggy succumbs to her doubts, faints, and awakes in her senior year in 1960, with the chance to do differently everything she wished she could.Peggy Sue Got Married proved to be a much more emotionally raw film than I ever expected. The nostalgia presented hits on a level any audience member can relate to and feel deeply. Coppola does an exceptional job shooting scenes in which Peggy stands out in her high school days, as she well should having the mentality of a 42- year- old woman. I felt that was this film's greatest strength. Not much was done to Kathleen Turner to make her look more like a teenager when she went back in time. The point of the film, however, is that Peggy goes back to a time in life in which we live in the moment only, with the feeling that what is going on at that point is the most important thing in the world and will shape the rest of our lives. Peggy, however, comes to this time with an extra 25 years of experience and foresight. She noticeably sticks out in the crowd because she is different from the crowd. She learns the lesson, which even she needed to learn, the choices you make in high school do not have to define your life.

Every blockbuster has its inferior clones. Peggy Sue Got Married follows the line of 1985's massively successful Back to the Future, with its protagonist travelling back in time a few decades to a world of rock 'n' rollers and high school dances. The similarities end here though, as Peggy Sue swaps Back to the Future's action comedy basis for a sweet romantic fairytale.Kathleen Turner stars as the titular heroine reliving her own youth. She gives a strong dramatic performance, never faltering in her conviction. She emphasises overwhelming emotion of seeing her past brought to life over a sense of surprise, and the character is all the stronger for it. The only trouble is, being in her early thirties she no longer had the appearance of a teenager, but then nor does she quite come across as the knowledgeable older woman. Nicholas Cage by contrast chooses to ham it up with a silly cartoon voice, although funnily enough he does capture the essence of a dopey teenager, albeit in a daft caricature. He's also quite convincing when aged up for the 1980s scenes. Towards the end there are some lovely cameos by veteran performers Leon Ames, Margaret Sullivan and John Carradine. Ames and Sullivan are just wonderfully steady and relaxed, with Ames managing to give eye-catching presence without actually doing much. Carradine is on screen for just a few seconds but he is really memorable with that old familiar voice of his.The director is Francis Ford Coppola. Although his post-70s projects have tended to be disappointing he still has talent as a moviemaker, with the elaborate yet subtle visual compositions that are his forte. The early scenes at the school reunion look fairly random, but notice how Coppola is carefully drawing our attention to various figures who will reappear in 1960, even relatively minor ones like the one played (then-unknown) Jim Carrey. A good example of Coppola's cunning arrangements comes after Nicholas Cage comes off stage after his performance at the party. The camera is behind Kathleen Turner's back, and we back away with her as Cage advances, moving their half of the screen round beside a pillar. The shot looks very natural and unforced, but it's subtly manipulating us and making us share in Turner's slight sense of revulsion.The problem with Peggy Sue Got Married, as with most of Coppola's 1980s output, does not lie in his direction or the efforts of his cast, but in a substandard screenplay. A major fault is that no explanation is given for Turner's time travel jump. Granted, a story like this doesn't need a science answer like in Back to the Future, but even something as light-hearted as a fairy godmother would have sufficed to give things a bit of sense, and would have been a whole lot better than that corny speech about time being a burrito that you fill with memories. The basic idea of the movie is a cute one, and it's not without its emotional tugs (greatly enhanced by a tender musical score), but the story lacks the cohesion and the characters lack the depth to make it a real tearjerker. Peggy Sue Got Married may be only an indirect reworking of Back to the Future, and yet it is as mediocre and dissatisfying as any cheap rip-off.