Peggy Sue Got Married is a little like the result of a drunken tryst between Valley Girl and Back to the Future, combining as it does aspects of both films (teenage love triangles, an idealized vision of postwar America, time travel, etc) with the symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome, most notably erratic behavior and speech impediments. The film opens with a middle-aged woman at her high school reunion, ruminating on the current state of her life-- she is in the process of divorcing her husband "Crazy" Charlie Bodell (Cage), an unfaithful appliance salesman whose moniker derives from his commercials, those peculiar eighties ads in which a loud sportscoat-and-bowtie wearing man boasts of his own psychosis, a mental illness as yet unrecognized by the DSM which manifests itself in the desire to sell goods below wholesale cost-- and wondering if things would have turned out better had she made different choices in high school. This kind of thinking naturally summons the Fairy Responsible for Granting Rhetorical and Ill-Advised Wishes, the Fulfillment of Which Teaches Important Life Lessons, Ultimately Revealing the Ill-Advised Nature of the Wish and Instating In The Wisher A Newfound Appreciation of the Status Quo (cf. Freaky Friday, It's a Wonderful Life) and she promptly faints and wakes up as a seventeen year old in 1960. After a requisite period of confusion during which she, like all unwitting time-travelers before her, stumbles about asking "What am I doing here?" and mystifying other characters with her oblique hints of the future, she dons her poodle skirt and begins to revel in the chance to relive her teenage years. Seeking to avoid the years of infidelity and misery that Charlie presages, she dumps him and begins pursuing the school's lone beatnik, a turtleneck-wearing, Keruoac-quoting poet who does everything short of breaking out a pair of bongo drums. She remains unwillingly drawn to Charlie, however-- sighing wistfully to her friends "He IS cute, isn't he?" in what is probably the movie's high point, a scene where Charlie and friends (one played by then unknown actor Jim Carrey) sing an acappella quartet while dressed in gold lame jackets and doing choreographed jazz hands-- and on prom night she winds up sleeping with him, an act we know will lead to her pregnancy and her and Charlie's subsequent marriage. As she irrevocably sets herself on the path to the future she has already had, she wakes up back at her high school reunion after a period of unconscious. As she asks herself that hoary question, "Was it all a dream?" she sees Charlie is anxiously sitting nearby, and the movie closes with a hint of potential reconciliation.
Playing Charlie, Cage is breaking type: he is the rich, baby-blue convertible driving, popular boyfriend that his characters usually steal women from, seducing the girls with his bad boy charm and leaving the boyfriends with naught but their popped collars/football trophies/Harvard diplomas to keep them company. If this movie is the child of Valley Girl, Cage is Tommy Jr. Cage's performance, however, reached a level of controversy Michael Bowen's could only have surpassed had he played Tommy as a blackface-wearing nun-rapist. To portray Charlie, Cage insisted on sporting a bleached blond pompadour and set of false teeth, and throughout the film he talks in an exaggerated nasal whine, giving a performance described as "stylized," "off-the-wall" or (as he himself put it) "Jerry Lewis on acid." This approach alienated both fellow cast members and the producers, who put strong pressure on director Coppola to fire him, which, either through familial loyalty or genuine artistic support, he refused to do, sticking by Cage and comparing his affected voice and dental inserts to Marlon Brando's cotton-stuffed mouth in The Godfather. Co-star Kathleen Turner was particularly displeased, repeatedly telling Cage "You're ruining the movie!" and summing up the situation in her 2008 memoirs: "Oh, that stupid voice of his and the fake teeth! Honestly, I cringe to think about it." Cage does not offer much in the way of his own defense:
I started doing this way-out voice, and people were rolling their eyes and saying 'What the hell is going on?' Kathleen Turner was frustrated with me. Here she is in this great star vehicle, directed by a great director, and her leading man comes along with buck teeth and ultra-blond hair, talking like Pokey from The Gumby Show. I can understand why she was pissed off. Can you blame her? I was basically working without regard for anyone on the movie, just doing whatever I wanted and hijacking the movie, for better or worse."
It was in fact for the worse, at least for the sake of the movie, which critics nearly unanimously praised all aspects of except Cage's performance. The strained relationship between the stars did not go unnoticed, as the New York Times review of the film bemoaned the "lack of any sense of rapport between Miss Turner and Mr. Cage" (a rapport which has only worsened through the years, as Cage recently sued Turner for writing in her aforementioned memoirs that while filming Peggy Sue he had been "arrested twice for drunk driving and, I think, once for stealing a dog. He'd come across a Chihuahua he liked and stuck it in his jacket.") However, although his eccentric performance did not win Cage many friends on the set, he was cast in his next two films, Raising Arizona and Moonstruck-- arguably two of his best movies and certainly ones that elevated his career to a new level-- on the basis of his turn as Charlie. In the end, he got a lot from doing this movie, even if not a chihuahua.
