Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Peggy Sue Got Married Blu-ray Movie Review

Trick Mirrors

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 21, 2013

The Eighties were a difficult decade for Francis Ford Coppola. Even though Apocalypse Now performed well at the box office, the film's infamously troubled creation damaged his reputation. The financial disaster of One From the Heart (1982) appeared to vindicate the naysayers, and the box office disappointment of The Cotton Club (1984), after a production tainted by scandal, merely provided more ammunition. (The box office and critical success of The Outsiders barely made a dent, because the film itself was considered a minor event.) Not until the Nineties, with The Godfather: Part III (1990) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), did Coppola begin to disentangle his reputation from the excesses of the past and his fortunes from the claims and creditors they had spawned.

One bright spot in this troubled era, however, was 1986's Peggy Sue Got Married, which Coppola took over from fledgling director Penny Marshall during pre-production. Based on an original script by husband-and-wife writers Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, Peggy Sue ingeniously combined a variation on time travel with a sort of romance-in-reverse that could easily have turned cloying and sentimental in different hands. Under Coppola's direction, and cast with numerous actors on the verge of major careers, the film became a box office success and was nominated for three Oscars.

Still, despite its favorable reception, Peggy Sue has never been one of the films on which Coppola has lavished ongoing attention, as he has with projects dear to his artistic heart like the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now or The Conversation. One gets the sense that he made the film as a director-for-hire and not with the kind of singular passion that motivated the films with which he is most closely identified. Certainly Peggy Sue has never received generous treatment in any video format. The new Blu-ray release from Image/RLJ Entertainment is devoid of extras, as was the DVD released by Sony in 1998. The sole consolation is that the transfer is excellent, and the disc has been mastered without flaws.

As 43-year-old Peggy Sue Bodell (Best Actress nominee Kathleen Turner) prepares to attend her 25th high school reunion accompanied by her 20-something daughter, Beth (Helen Hunt), she practices putting a brave face on a life that hasn't worked out. She loves her two children (Beth's bother, Scott, is barely seen), but her marriage to their father, high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage), is ending in divorce. Charlie, a local celebrity known as "Crazy Charlie" because he does his own ads for his appliance and stereo store, has left her for a younger woman.

At the reunion of Buchanan class of 1960, Peggy Sue finds herself reminiscing with her two best friends from high school, who represent the opposite ends of the spectrum of possibilities. Maddy (Joan Allen) married high school boyfriend Arthur Nagle (Wil Shriner), but unlike Peggy Sue and Charlie, theirs is a marriage that still works. Carol (Catherine Hicks) moved to the big city, stayed single and lives the independent life of a career woman. Tonight, though, she is reconnecting with her goofball high school boyfriend, Walter Getz (Jim Carrey), who has become a successful dentist.

Everyone is eager to shake the hand of the class's most successful alum, Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), the science nerd who made a fortune in computers. The jock who used to bully him is now a broker at Merrill Lynch who wants to invest his money. But the person to whom Norvik most wants to say hello is Peggy Sue, because, he tells her, she was always nice to him.

Though Charlie had promised to stay away, he eventually shows up, staggering from drink. He's just in time to see Richard Norvik crowned reunion "king" (Charlie's title at the prom 25 years ago) and his soon-to-be-ex-wife crowned "queen", mostly because of her outfit, a classically shiny Sixties prom dress, when everyone else is wearing standard cocktail attire. As the crowd cheers and Peggy Sue is handed a bouquet of roses, it's all too much, and she collapses on the stage.

When Peggy Sue awakens, everyone is still there, but they're all 25 years younger. It's 1960, and Peggy Sue is once again a senior in high school. She's reliving her life, but she remembers everything that happened the first time around.

As Coppola follows his leading lady on a tour through Peggy Sue's former life (Turner's performance here is one of her very best), they sustain a light-hearted tone with such an apparent lack of effort that it's easy to overlook the enormity of the stakes. The young Richard Norvik, to whom Peggy Sue confesses her secret because she needs a science geek's advice on time travel, has some inkling of the risks of altering the future, but Peggy Sue herself is too caught up in the pleasures of revisiting people and places she remembers fondly, but now with an adult's confidence. She blithely tells off her algebra teacher, hugs her kid sister, Nancy (a gawky Sofia Coppola), without a trace of sibling rivalry, breaks up with Charlie before he can get her pregnant (which is why they married), and heads straight for Michael Fitzsimmon (Kevin J. O'Connor), the brooding, Kerouac-quoting hipster on a motorcycle about whom she'd always fantasized.

But there's a downside to knowing the future. As Peggy Sue looks at Charlie, she sees past the brash teenager full of hope that he'll make it as a singer and avoid being trapped in his father's business, beyond to the years of failure and rejection, and finally to the bitter man in his forties who will walk out on his family. It's a melancholy vision. Peggy Sue tries to warn him, but of course the teenaged Charlie still believes he'll succeed. Worse, the very effort to spare Charlie pain is an admission on Peggy Sue's part of how much she still loves him, and that's the very emotion she's trying to squelch, both in 1985 and here again in 1960.

It's on a visit to her grandmother (Maureen O'Sullivan) and grandfather (Leon Ames) that Peggy Sue finally realizes why she has returned to 1960—if, in fact, that's what she's done; her grandmother says she's "just browsing through time". One of the special privileges of reliving your life is the opportunity to discover just how much you participated in choices you thought were forced upon you. Given the chance, would you really do things differently? That is the question that Peggy Sue must ultimately face.

A note for first-time viewers: Nicolas Cage made the Johnny-Depp-like choice to play Charlie Bodell as a cartoon character; he took Charlie's high, nasal voice from the character of Pokey on The Gumby Show. Both Turner and the studio hated it, and Coppola, who had promised Cage wide latitude as a condition of taking the part, had to intervene to prevent him from getting fired. Cage's performance here isn't one of his best, but the exaggerated style fits within the film's general depiction of high school boys, at least as Peggy Sue remembers them.

Peggy Sue Got Married Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Peggy Sue Got Married was photographed by the late Jordan Cronenweth, the visionary cinematographer of Blade Runner and Altered States. The scenes set in "present day" (which, for this film, is 1985) have a gauzy, filtered and subdued look that is thematically appropriate and also provides practical advantages, given the make-up required to age the cast into their mid-40s. When Peggy Sue returns to 1960, colors brighten and the image becomes considerably less soft, as Cronenweth lends the experience a surreal edge.

The source material for Image's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is in pristine condition (or has been restored to it), and the transfer supplied by Sony maintains the consistently high standards for the titles it has licensed to Image. The image, while soft by the standards of today's film stocks and digital photography, is detailed throughout, with a small dip during the opening credit sequence due to the use of optical superimposition. The film's natural grain structure has been accurately retained and finely rendered so that, unless you are sitting much too close to your display device, you should barely notice it. No artificial sharpening or other untoward manipulation has been applied, and the result is beautiful film-like image that as closely replicates the theatrical experience as one could possibly hope.

The blacks in nightime scenes, of which several are crucial, are solid. The color palette, which is dialed down for the 1985 scenes even at the reunion, pops during the 1960 scenes, especially for such critical elements as Charlie's famously blue set of wheels or the gold lamé of his singing group's jackets. With no extras, the 103-minute film resides comfortably on a BD-25 with a sufficient average bitrate of 24.88 Mbps.

Peggy Sue Got Married Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Peggy Sue Got Married's original mono track has been remixed for 5.1 and is presented here in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1. It's a conservative, front-oriented remix that doesn't try to achieve anything gimmicky with sound effects but leaves the action mostly in the center, where it originally was. Stereo separation improves the musical performance at the reunion by the Marshall Crenshaw Band and also by Charlie and his buddies in 1960. The sparingly used but charming and romantic score by John Barry also benefits from the more expansive presentation. Dialogue is clear and natural-sounding.

(Note: Contrary to the specifications listed on the back cover, the only subtitle option is English SDH. There are no Spanish or French subtitles.)

Peggy Sue Got Married Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No extras are included. According to information from a Blu-ray.com member, Sony's 1998 DVD contained trailers for Peggy Sue Got Married, Guarding Tess and It Could Happen to You.

Peggy Sue Got Married Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mirrors are a recurring visual motif in Peggy Sue Got Married. Coppola opens and closes the film with shots of the camera zooming in or out of large mirrors reflecting Peggy Sue and members of her family, and similar reflections appear at key points throughout the story. Since an actual mirror would also have shown camera and crew and the digital technology did not yet exist to remove them in post-production, Coppola had to achieve these effects with doubles mimicking the actors' movements on the opposite side of an empty frame. Watch closely and you can spot moments where the actors fall out of synch. It almost certainly wasn't intentional, but I've always regarded it as one of those "happy accidents" that enhances the visual metaphor. The casual self-appraisals we undertake on a daily basis may, like a glance in the mirror, not be accurate. Genuine understanding requires deep and honest introspection: perhaps a trip into the past and oneself, where a three-dimensional walkaround may finally reveal the truth. Highly recommended.