The Weekly Screed (#917)

Peggy Sue Got Sabotaged

By David Benjamin

“Well, Mr. Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra, and I speak from experience.”

         — Kathleen Turner, in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

PARIS — Having long ago shut down our link to French broadcast, we use our TV here to watch old movies. In this pastime, I indulge two guilty pleasures. One is smart teenage flicks, a slim canon that includes Heathers, Mean Girls, Drop Dead Gorgeous and the granddaddy of them all, Rebel Without a Cause. My other cinema weakness is time travel, dating back to marathon viewings at the old Erwin Theater in Tomah, watching Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux wave kitchen matches at the Morlocks in The Time Machine. 

Given this perversity, I return now and then to Peggy Sue Got Married, directed incongruously by Francis Ford Coppola (not a guy oft associated with high-school hi-jinks or sci-fi farce). Peggy Sue is one of only two watchable teen time-travel films (the other is Back to the Future I), but it’s a movie to which I’ve always returned with a nagging ambivalence. There’s something wrong but I’d never been able to pin it down.

Luckily, a while before this latest trip to our Paris garret, I’d read David Hajdu’s exhaustive history of church-lady panic, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare & How It Changed America. Among Hajdu’s many nostalgic references was Archie Comics, one of the wellsprings of my cultural education. From age 8 ’til maybe 14, I — like most budding intellectuals in Monroe County — avidly traced the existential trials of Archie and Jughead, Betty and the voluptuous Veronica, Moose, Midge and Reggie, the smarmy interloper.

 

Memory refreshed by Hajdu, I was able — as I watched Kathleen Turner scroll back in time from tortured divorcée to her teenage self — to understand how Nicolas Cage, Turner’s leading man, screwed up Peggy Sue Got Married.

Of course, if you’re a sentient adult with a job and a life, you probably haven’t watched Peggy Sue in 30-odd years. So I’ll review the salient points.

The first blush of Cage’s character, Charlie Bodell, is his voice. He speaks in a jarring nasal whinge that morphs unexpectedly into a breathy tenor. Physically, Charlie swoops, mugs, flaps his wings in joy, slouches in dejection, snaps his head erect in sudden realization. He literally trembles with fear, his mouth forms an “O” to express shock, and he gasps audibly in moments of deep emotion.

At first impression, Cage seems to be reviving silent-film histrionics, after the style of Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. But no, Cage’s Charlie is more complicated.

While Cage is limning his idiosyncratic interpretation of Charlie, other actors are observing the script. Each — Barry Miller as Richard Norvik, Catherine Hicks as Carol, Joan Allen as Maddy, Jim Carrey as Walter, etc. — walks a fine line, depicting the same character in periods 25 years apart. Although in some respects a live-action cartoon, the film broaches Peggy Sue’s real-life dilemma of reconciling her past, and it examines timeless coming-of-age themes. It’s not Bugs Bunny. So actors like Carrey and Hicks, while playing broadly for laughs, must make viewers believe these are real people. To achieve this, the actors remember being teenage kids. They capture the mixture of high energy, suppressed sexuality and naiveté, with a pinch of cruelty that defined their own adolescence.

 

Only Nicolas Cage, among the ensemble, seems to have never been a teenager. Studying his labors in Peggy Sue, I remembered a) a high-school friend named Ray who was a natural actor and so fixed on his future on the stage that he barely registered the teenage turmoil that swirled all around him, and b) Archie Andrews of Riverdale High, the comic-book archetype of teenage turmoil.

If he’d been told to portray a high-school kid, Ray would have drawn a blank, because he never truly was a high-school kid. Such was the adolescence, I suspect, of Nicolas Cage. Acting — scenery-smashing, curtain-chewing, to-be-or-not-to-be Thespianism — was Cage’s consuming passion. Or so I surmise!

 

I think it not a coincidence that Cage’s director in Peggy Sue, Francis Coppola, had directed Marlon Brando, fourteen years before, in The Godfather. Among all the many “method actors,” driven by guru Konstantin Stanislavski to somehow absorb, feel, and literally become the character they pretend to be, Brando was the foremost Hollywood protagonist of The Method.

 

Cage is a Methodist. You can see it in his eyes. Coppola recognized this ferocity and conceded Cage’s hunger to turn Charlie, a teenage flake with dreams of becoming the next Dion DiMucci, into Stanley Kowalski. The only hitch: not having ever been a teenager, Cage had to bone up. He turned, I believe, either to Archie Comics or — perhaps even worse — Teen Love.

The result was a gasping, swooping, shuffling and leaping, breathy-voiced male ingenue more reminiscent of Blanche DuBois than Brando in an undershirt. (Cage, thank God, actually got to be Stanley in his next flick, Moonstruck.) True to his research, though,  Cage captured the antics of Archie Andrews. Here was a pulp caricature brought, creepily, to the silver screen, where he struts and frets away two bizarre hours among a dozen other actors who understood the assignment.

Of course, the result is that the movie, warped inadvertently by Stanislavski, comes off just cock-eyed enough to leave the viewer ineffably perplexed.

 

Still, I like this flick. Kathleen Turner lends Peggy Sue a poignance mixed with piercing irony. She tends to deliver her best lines as knowing asides to the audience, lending wit and depth to a goofy premise. There’s actual evidence that Turner saved the film from total sabotage by Cage’s “coulda been a contender” intensity. In a 2018 interview with David Marchese on the website Vulture, Turner said she was nonplussed when she first heard Nicholas Cage’s adenoid vocal stylings, but she didn't think it was her job to direct another actor's performance. She talked to Coppola and asked if he had approved Cage's “method.” Coppola drew a blank and gave Cage his (bouffant) head. In response, Turner contrived to play off Cage in ways that covered some of his weirdness.

But not all of it. Watch the scene where he turns down free nookie. 

I think I spent so much time pondering Peggy Sue, a minor flick from out of the past, because it conveys a lesson for an aspiring young writer.  It demonstrates how a steady narrative can be transformed — ruined, muddled or just distorted — by the miscasting or misfeasance of a single character, or by a twist in the plot that disrupts its flow in a way that can’t be set straight easily or believably. 

Nick Cage got better as his career progressed. I love him in Con Air! But I can’t help believing, deep down, that Peggy Sue shoulda married Johnny Depp.