Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

  It's been an 80s kind of weekend, apparently.  I wasn't planning on that happening but we're just going to roll with it.

Peggy Sue's (Kathleen Turner) life is on the verge of falling apart.  Her high school reunion is happening and all she can think about is how much different her life would have been if she hadn't married her childhood sweetheart, Charlie (Nicolas Cage), whom she is currently divorcing for being a lying cheat.  While being crowned Reunion Queen, Peggy Sue passes out and finds herself back in her seventeen-year-old body able to relive the fateful decisions she made just before graduating high school.  Will she finally hook up with the brooding loner (Kevin J. O'Connor) she always had a crush on?  Will she find new reasons to love Charlie?  Will she partner with the smart kid (Barry Miller) in order to "invent" the Walkman and make a fortune?

This is a 1980s film by Francis Ford Coppola so surprise!  She winds up with his nephew.  Nicolas Cage is absolutely awful in this, by the way, telegraphing all the weirdness that has hallmarked his career.  He has a bizarre accent, big fake teeth, and a terrible dye job.  Also, I don't know what's up with the costuming.  Every single outfit in the "past" is gray.  Every. Single. One.  Not just Peggy Sue's; all her friends wear either actual gray or muted versions of other colors.  It's very weird.

I had to get that off my chest before I could get into the other grossness of the regressive gender politics in play.  Peggy Sue feels trapped in a life she never wanted, even though she has made the best of it and loves her two children.  When she is given the opportunity to change her future, she does everything she can.  She breaks up with Charlie, she sleeps with the beatnik, she builds stronger relationships with her family.  And it all means nothing.  Charlie is repeatedly shown to be violent, selfish, and completely uninterested in Peggy Sue as anything more than an object and status symbol. And she cannot escape him.  The film pays lip service to her just "being in love" with him and that's why they end up together but nothing is shown to indicate why she would love him other than her just being inculcated to be.  That's a textbook abusive relationship.  The fact that Coppola dresses it up as a happy ending is creepy and gross.

But hey, it's got Jim Carrey in it as a coked-up dentist!