Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Posted on January 27, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Back to the Future is a film I have deep reservoirs of affection for, and I know it’s far from a landmark statement — I’m hardly in the minority. However, I will say that as I began to watch Peggy Sue Got Married, I slowly became attuned to its world and the unfolding premise. There seemed to be some very basic similarities.

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) attends her 25th high school reunion with her daughter (Helen Hunt), reconnecting with old friends even as she rues her relationship with her husband and high school sweetheart (Nicolas Cage). She’s christened the evening’s queen of the class and faints from the excitement. As she drifts away, she wakes up, and it’s 1960 again. No DeLorean or Libyan terrorist necessary. She opens her eyes, and she’s there.

Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner’s screenplay utilizes some of the same time-tested tropes from Back to the Future, like uncanny knowledge that feels sentient to those living in the past, even as it’s common knowledge to those in the future, be it the Moon landing or pantyhose (or Calvin Klein for that matter). These breed rampant cultural miscommunications — the kind you get in these fish-out-of-water stories — engendered by messing with time. Peggy even bemoans the fact that she’s a walking anachronism.

The beauty of the picture is how it becomes something else entirely as it gets beyond these cursory elements to bring us something different — a far more pensive meditation. It’s not bombastic with Zemeckis’s flair for Sci-Fi or Christopher Lloyd’s out-of-this-world performance as Doc Brown. There aren’t the same ticking clocks or steadily increasing stakes that Marty must race against to save his parents (and his entire family’s existence). It’s not about that.

Kathleen Turner’s Peggy also has a poise and foresight Marty McFly was never supposed to have. Yes, they both go from the future into the past, but what a difference their life of experience makes.

Even the mechanisms of the time travel itself feel less important and mostly immaterial. We get beyond them quite quickly to focus on something more. Peggy marvels at seeing her parents as they used to be, as she remembers them when she was younger, and cherishes reconnecting with her baby sister (Sofia Coppola) as time has yet to sour their relationship.

At school, her whole outlook is different, too. Yes, she’s not prepared to redo her academics in the classroom, but her values are more intrinsic, and her social outlook is much more sincere. She’s cast off the insecurity we all have at that age to see the landscape with much greater lucidity.

She befriends the outcasts (one’s a nerd and a future billionaire); it’s not because she wants to capitalize on his future success, but because she knows he will believe her crazy reality. The other is a free spirit who scoffs at the literature they’re inculcated with in textbooks, instead nourishing himself on the self-expression of Jack Kerouac. It’s creative fodder for his own poetry as he seems to embody the dreams she never managed to pursue.

Also, she fosters an alternate relationship with her high school sweetheart: the man she married out of high school and ultimately divorced. She recognizes and even appreciates new contours to his character she was never prepared to notice before, just as she comes to forgive his flaws.

The casting as a whole might feel tighter than Back to the Future (which even famously included Michael J. Fox as an eleventh-hour replacement). There are so many faces who show up and give the right essence to the roles, whether it’s a young Jim Carrey, a very young Sofia Coppola, or Barbara Harris and Don Murray.

I will say, I’m not sure if Nic Cage’s characterization is to the benefit of the movie. His voice, his whining, almost petulant nature. He’s aged with makeup to near-comic proportions. And even this and his connection to the director (Coppola is his uncle) lend themselves to a kind of rapport. Because what is he supposed to be if not a mixed-up, angsty, regretful high schooler? Somehow, even this has less of the winking humor of Back to the Future. Miscast or not, it has an alternate level of sincerity.

And of course, there’s the instance when Peggy meets her grandparents. Leon Ames and Maureen O’Sullivan are impeccable. It’s such a pleasure to watch them because, being an Old Hollywood aficionado, they’ve been offered to me in so many films of yore. But the very rhythm of Peggy Sue visiting her grandparents is such a meaningful and cathartic one. It’s as if she’s somehow reclaiming these moments she always wished to have back, even as she willfully shares her out-of-body experience and gains a rapt and receptive audience in her elders.

In their eyes, she’s not crazy. It’s as if any skepticism has evaporated with time, and all that’s left over is a heavy dose of wonder and congeniality. True, I was a bit weirded out by her grandpa’s lodge, even as Bruce Dern’s secret society in Smile unnerved me. Here, it still manages to fit into the time travel narrative even as it lacks the level of import of Hill Valley’s clock tower. Again, that’s hardly the point.

When Peggy returns to her present, back to her daughter, her estranged husband, and everything else, whether through dreams or some other uncanny supernatural force, she has changed. This is what matters. It’s not butterfly effects or space-time continuums or quantum mechanics or anything like that. I can hardly speak to any of these. The movie speaks to what is universal: It’s the gift of getting to redirect your life, saying “I love you” to those you wish you had more time with, and reclaiming the mistakes gnawing at you. It feels like the most serendipitous type of science fiction.

When you have the likes of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or even The Conversation to your name, Peggy Sue Got Married is never going to enter into the conversation of Coppola’s best films. It’s mostly subdued and full of the joy and jubilation of a different time. But Coppola actually examines some fairly profound themes.

What’s more, although Kathleen Turner is mostly pigeonholed as a siren or a beauty, she’s quite good in a role that’s not flashy, and yet allows her to offer up a performance with subtle aplomb. It’s easy for these types of period movies (or movies from the ’80s in general) to feel like pastiche — mostly inane and made thoroughly for consumption. Even Back to the Future is ’80s Hollywood at its very best.

Here it feels like great care is being taken, and there’s a level of reflection and maturity that’s hard to discount. It’s saying something when we follow this woman through time and space, and we pretty much leave that device behind. What’s not lost is her emotional journey.

4/5 Stars

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Posted on September 25, 2015 by 4 Star Films

In her debut, Sofia Coppola fashions the 1970s with a washed out wistfulness that feels like a distant memory — lingering for a time — leaving a few far away remembrances to be eulogized and reminisced about.

Her film is really about two groups. There are the Lisbon girls who live with their militantly authoritarian parents and then the neighborhood boys who look on with awe. These girls are the unattainable prize that all of these young men are entranced by. They are not besmirched or dirtied by the ways of the world, stuck in the ivory tower of their parent’s home. It’s almost as if they come out of a dream, so pure and in the same way so provocative.

However, things get shaken up when the youngest daughter attempt to commit suicide and then in a free moment she jumps out of the window and meets death by the metal fence posts below. Red flags should be going up everywhere, but stubborn Mrs. Lisbon only becomes more stringent in her moralistic ways. She should be trusting her daughters, allowing them certain freedoms, but she only takes away more. And reluctant Mr. Lisbon does nothing to stop her. He just lets it be.

Only allowed to socialize at one dance under strict guidelines, the girls relish this opportunity and so do the boys. They finally get their chance with a different class of girl. But after the smitten Lux breaks curfew, all the sisters lose all contact with the outside world. The iron gates go down, and she never gets another moment with high school heartthrob Trip. On top of that, their mother makes her burn all her records in another strict turn.

Lux defies her passively in any way possible as she and her sisters try and maintain contact with the boys on the outside. But there is a point for any person where this type of confinement, this type of prison, gets to be too much. The girls reach the end of their rope and take the only way out they can see.

Oddly enough, most of the boys have little personality, but the focus is the Lisbons and specifically their daughters. The Virgin Suicides was partly intriguing because it never seemed to take on some dramatic tone and it never felt all that personal. I felt so far away. As Carol King mournfully sang, “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore. It would be so fine to see your face at my door. Doesn’t help to know you’re so far away.” That’s exactly what this film does. It doesn’t allow us to get close and that aloofness lent itself to the intrigue we have in these girls. We’re pulled into their story along with all these young boys.

3.5/5 Stars

Body Heat (1981)

Posted on June 1, 2015 by 4 Star Films

In his directorial debut, Lawrence Kasdan (screenwriter for Empire Strikes Back and Raiders) brought us a neo-noir burning with passion and positively dripping in sweat. Quite the combination indeed.

It opens with the seductively jazzy score, courtesy of John Barry, dancing over the credits. It brings to mind cool afternoons with cool drink in hand. The first shot we are met with is a man driving in his convertible, top down and shades up. He’s a cool and collected looking young man, but we know that there must be something lurking underneath all of this. This exterior is soon dropped and we are met with a reality that is heavy with humidity and sticky days.

Our protagonist is Ned Racine (William Hurt) who is a struggling lawyer working in Florida during an especially sweltering Florida heat wave. One indelible evening he has his first encounter with a beautiful, cool blonde named Matty (Kathleen Turner) whose temperature runs a little hotter than most. He makes a pass or two even after finding she is married, and she rejects his attempts at first. However, during a point of no return, the two give into their cravings and spiral into a passionate tryst. Their affair is fairly easy to keep hidden from Mr. Walker (Richard Crenna), but an old high school friend of Matty’s and Matty’s niece unwittingly find them out one way or another.

They’ve had enough of secrecy and Racine resolves they must kill Walker so that Matty might be freed and so she might also get money due to his impending death. Not satisfied with that, Matty wants to alter the will so she gets more. Racine is completely against that idea.

The night of the murder comes and they act it out with precision and Racine gets rid of the body. He finds out only afterward that Matty had a new will drawn up and he doesn’t like it one bit, but he is forced to play along. The prosecutor and police detective involved in the case (Ted Danson and J.A. Preston) happen to be friends with Ned through work. They spend many a sweaty afternoon chatting it up at the local diner. That’s what makes it hard when all the facts begin to pile up and slowly but surely Ned’s involvement becomes more suspect. His alibi and the degree of his relationship with Ms. Walker is being questioned.

Meanwhile, he and Matty must find a pair of glasses that might incriminate them. It becomes clear all too soon that things are not as they seem. Matty ultimately abandons Ned, and he winds up behind bars, happier without her. In one final revelation, he starts to put some of the pieces to together in prison. He’s a hot mess.

It’s difficult not to make comparisons between a film like this and classic noir such as Double Indemnity. In both films, there is a man who seems fully committed to going through with a crime, but it is really the woman who has the most to gain from the situation. Furthermore, Ned as the Walter Neff character has his Barton Keyes in the form of Lowenstein and Oscar, who are friends but also the ones who must bring him to justice. However, Body Heat can get away with more, such as sexuality and allowing certain crimes to go unpunished. It’s a rather surprising ending that is nonetheless very interesting.

Body Heat also has the cigarette prevalence of a film-noir (which Ted Danson comically will not take part in). It’s as if Lowenstein is the only character who realizes this habit is out of place in a world of 1980s sensibilities, not to mention crimes of passion. It was odd seeing Ted Danson in a pre-Cheers role gulping down ice tea after ice tea. Kathleen Turner and William Hurt were a good fit as the gorgeous siren and her partner in crime. They are two attractive people and yet that did not put them outside of the law as they would find out. Body Heat certainly wrenched up the heat a couple of notches and never let off. It positively burns with frenetic energy and unbridled passion.

4/5 Stars