Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

atomicgirl-34996 Peggy Sue Got Married is such a weird film. On one hand, there are parts of the movie that are so magnificently directed that they've stayed with me all these years in spite of how weak the film is on the whole. For example, I wasn't born in the 1960s but those early scenes with Peggy Sue when she first travels back in time are pure magic. I not only can vicariously experience her feelings of awe and wonder at returning to the 1960s, I even become overcome with waves nostalgia about that time period even though I had no idea what life was like in 1960. Coppola really did a magnificent job there.Also, even if you didn't get a feel for the 1960s, those scenes captured perfectly an experience we've all had when we've become disenchanted with our lives today, a desire to revisit an earlier, more innocent time. I've actually had a dream very similar to Peggy Sue Got Married, except I dreamed that I had to returned to the 1980s. It was a very short dream, but I had the same warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia and a sense of happiness that I had "returned", so I could really relate to those scenes of Peggy Sue when she first returns to 1960.So as far as the first act of Peggy Sue Got Married, the film is wonderful. The rest of the film, on the other hand, not so much. Once you get past the initial scenes of Peggy readjusting to family and school life, things start to go south. The story begins to meander. It's basically one scene after another of Peggy Sue looking surprised that she's in the past, expressing happiness at seeing people who had long since passed or trying to explain future technology to a nerdy kid at school. Yes, there's a subplot involving her high school sweetheart. But that's about it. There's no tension to the story or no real statement being made. Like, there could've been tension about whether Peggy could return to the 1980s or not, but there's nothing. There could've been a statement about viewing the past through rose- tinted glasses. But, there's nothing profound being said. There are just little jokes about the past and the present, like a reference about boomboxes (portable radios being larger while everything gets smaller). Okay, funny and cute but so what?The second biggest problem with the movie was the casting. I did not like a lot of the actors in this. They either seemed miscast or were just terrible. Even though Barbara Harris was the right age to play Peggy Sue's mother, she didn't look old enough or have the right look of a 1960s parent like Don Murray did. She looked more like her sister than her mother, so all those scenes of her being motherly to Peggy Sue were just weird. Sofia Coppola was echhh...about as awkward as you could expect for a kid who was put in a movie for the obvious reasons. (Her gawky delivery of, "Teenagers are weird, and you're the weirdest," still lingers in my brain.)However, if I had to choose the worst actor of the bunch, it would be Nicolas Cage. He completely ruins the film. For no reason at all, he puts on this ridiculous voice that's just shy of Jerry Lewis in the Nutty Professor. It's just so obnoxious. But it also ruins the character and the backstory between him and Peggy Sue. He's supposed to be the cool kid who she falls in love with and winds up marrying and yet, ironically, comes out looking like the dorkiest, most immature and most annoying kid in school, even worse than the nerdy classmate. It was so bad that I spent the entire duration of the movie asking what she could've seen in him. Yes, the explanation was that Peggy Sue in 1960 was more naive and clueless but Nicolas Cage made him so dorky and unlikable that I still had a hard time believing that even as a naive teenager she could've fallen in love with him. Also, he was far too young to playing this character in middle age. Were it not for the first act of the movie, I would've rated Peggy Sue Got Married much higher but it gets a 6/10 from me for the story and Nicolas Cage's acting.

HillstreetBunz It is Kathleen's deeply touching performance that holds the centre of this movie. The central conceit of "If I knew then what I know now" is nothing new (it wasn't in 1986 when this movie came out either) but what strikes me as unusual about the film, is the way the central characters foibles are presented with so little judgement, the reflection seeming to be just that youth has its follies., and so it seems does experience. With love, all is forgivable and everything can be overcome. Hardly a new perspective, and were it not for the wry script and well defined and beautifully played performances the story might be an overblown, twee nostalgia fest. But it's not. It speaks to the pain of disappointment in ones life, to things that might have been, to pain and loss and love and maturity and life's experience with an edge. Not coarsely, not by screaming at the audience, but through some truly tender moments, such Peggy Sue hearing her late grandmothers voice on the telephone, or coming to the aid of those she didn't understand so well as a girl. Turner is an intelligent actress (sadly underused for the last twenty years) capable of taking the audience deep into her characters own heart and mind, and when she gave this Oscar nominated performance she was possibly at the height of her career.

kenjha At a high school reunion, a woman gets an opportunity to travel back to her school days. The theme of time travel was tackled with far more success a couple of years earlier in "Back to the Future," a film that is not great but is fun. This one is not fun. With its uninspired story and clichéd characters, it quickly runs out of steam and drags on far too long. Turner, in the midst of a fabulous first decade to start her career, is terrific, but the acting is otherwise uneven. Cage is the worst offender. He not only looks and acts goofy, but sports an annoying voice that sounds like a cartoon character. The familiar cast includes veterans O'Sullivan and Ames (his last film) as Turner's grandparents.

ElMaruecan82 After I could transfer them to DVD format, all my childhood films were finally available, and what a night I spent two days ago, I laugh, I cried and I meditated. I showed my family to my wife, the way it was and the way I was. But the film was slowly filling my heart with melancholy especially the sight of my parents. I couldn't believe how young, how baby-faced they were … and seeing myself so little, so innocent, so full of premises, I couldn't help but focus on all the stuff I would have made if only I knew how tough life would be, If only I knew.But no one ever knows. At least we all deal with the same rules, and maybe that's what makes life worth living, but imagine just for once, if we could. Haven't you ever wondered what if you could get back to the past, and provide one piece of advice or two to yourself? Or haven't you simply wished to travel back to time if only to speak a last time to the people who left you? Francis Ford Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married" is a sweet and tender fantasy film that explores all these thrilling possibilities. Indeed, that's the kind of delightful plot lines no one could possibly resist because it carries many premises on both comedic and dramatic level.I suspect the idea grew in the mind of a clever screenwriter with all these 'what if' interrogations. And although it is probably inspired by the high school/ nostalgia/ coming to age wave characterized by the success of "Back to the Future" and Howard Hughes' teenage films of the 80's, the film borrows also some elements to a very defining movie of Francis Ford Coppola's generation, "American Graffiti". It's set in 1960, it has cars and rock'n'roll and it encapsulates the youthful innocence of the pre-Vietnam, pre-Kennedy years. No wonder, both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel made it in their Top 10 lists, they loved "American Graffitti", they loved "It's a Wonderful Life", how can't they love a film that borrows crucial plot elements to both, and still remain original.And Kathleen Turner is the Capraesque heroine; she plays Peggy Sue with a wonderful mix of childish enthusiasm and adult poignancy. The performance, rightfully Oscar-nominated, is so endearing that any consideration about her looks as a teenager are pointless. Peggy Sue is a woman in her 40's, with two grown-up kids, divorcing from her high school love Charlie (Nicolas Cage). She's victim of an emotional strike that causes her to faint during the 25th celebration of her high school promotion, and suddenly, she wakes up in 1960. She's still the same Peggy Sue but trapped in her teenage body, at a time where everything is possible … again. Is it a dream, a parallel universe, a time loop or a life-changing experience? The film leaves many questions unanswered because it needs to keep a focus on the essential: the relationships. In her mind, she's either dead or dreaming, so she tries to live this 'resurrection' to the fullest, starting with her family: she's thrilled to see her parents or to play with Nancy, her sister. She's less enchanted though with her soon-to-be husband Charlie, wannabe singer but future TV actor. The generation gap between Peggy and Charlie inspires one of the film's most memorable moment when she disconcerts him by delivering what he calls a "guy's line". Cage displays a true level of insecurity and vulnerable youth in that particular moment, he almost steals Turner's show, and on her side, she's so great that she doesn't turn her character into a sort of one-dimensional role, sometimes she's even too rude by blaming Charlie in advance for faults he hasn't committed. It's for these kinds of scene that "Peggy Sue Got Married" was probably designed and it had also the intelligence not to avoid the theme of death, with the heart-breaking and powerful moment when she talks to her grandmother in the phone. She knows that's an aspect of her life she can't change, and while she tries sometimes, like when she gives Charlie the lyrics of a Beatles' hit song (a reminiscence of "Back to the Future"'s 'Johnny B. Goode'), she understands very soon that her life is her story, she had kids with Charlie and she misses them. My father often wondered what if he didn't do this or that, I generally suggest him not to ask such questions because maybe if he had succeeded, I wouldn't have existed, and my brothers wouldn't. I guess the wisdom is still to resign to what we have done, to conjugate our lives in the future and not turn it into a bunch of 'would'. It's hard to deal with, but we have no choice, and maybe it's better that we can't, imagine Peggy Sue's spell in the hands of malevolent people. "Peggy Sue Got Married" handles its material with relative intelligence and tenderness. Yet the movie is not without flaws and this comes from a fan of Coppola, some casting choices are much debatable, notably those guided by his fatherly instinct, and a bunch of jokes fall flat. Yes, there is a reason why the film isn't as highly regarded as "Back to the Future" or "Groundhog Day" I guess if it weren't for Kathleen Turner's extraordinary performance, it would have been easily forgotten. But well, if there is one thing we learn from the film it's that what is done is done and we should deal with it and consider the essential, the heart and the message. On that level, "Peggy Sue" is still a charming and heart-warming coming(back)-to-age story conveying an irresistible bittersweet feeling.