Plot
Peggy Sue Bodell (Kathleen Turner) sets off for her 25-year high school reunion, albeit hesitantly, with her daughter, Beth (Helen Hunt), coming along as company. Peggy Sue has just separated from her former high school sweetheart, now husband, Charlie (Nicolas Cage), and is wary of attending the reunion because of everyone questioning her about the absence of Charlie; they have been married since she became pregnant at the end of high school.
Peggy Sue arrives at the reunion and is happy to reconnect with her old friends, Maddy (Joan Allen) and Carol (Catherine Hicks), and all start to comment on old high school memories and how times (and classmates) have changed. Charlie unexpectedly arrives at the reunion, causing an awkward scene with Peggy Sue ignoring him. The awkwardness is ended when the event MC announces the reunion’s "king and queen." The king is Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), a former class geek turned multi-millionaire computer whiz. Peggy Sue is named the queen, but on arriving at the stage, she faints.
When Peggy Sue awakens, she finds she’s gone back to the spring of 1960, her senior year of high school, having passed out after donating blood. Peggy at first believes she died at the reunion, but then comes to accept that she has gone back in time. She’s in shock to see old family members so young and to talk to relatives who have since died. She attends high school classes and meets with old (now-young) friends as well as their now-young boyfriends (Jim Carrey in one of his earliest roles is among them). Peggy answers simple questions with adult responses. For example, when her mother asks if she and Charlie had a fight, she replies yes—but about "house payments," talking about their future divorce. She also makes a get-rich-quick reference of going to England to discover The Beatles.
Peggy is confused by this new/old world, but she’s fascinated to get to live high school all over again and say things she always wanted to say (such as telling off rude girls and informing an algebra teacher she knows, for a fact, that she will never need algebra in her life). She uses this opportunity to repair an estranged relationship with her younger sister, Nancy (Sofia Coppola). One thing Peggy is not happy about is that she’s still dating Charlie. She breaks up with him and has a one-night stand with Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O'Connor)—the guy in school she always wished she’d slept with.
Peggy Sue soon sees that this Charlie (at 18 years) is not the same as the adulterous Charlie she left in 1985 and Peggy starts to fall in love with him all over again, though the relationship still has its problems. Meanwhile, she contacts the young (ever geeky) Richard and asks for his advice on time travel. He seems to believe her as they discuss events and inventions that do not yet exist. Her inquiries into time travel lead to her grandfather, who agrees to try a strange séance ritual with his Masonic Lodge buddies to send her forward in time.
Peggy is kidnapped by Charlie. He takes her to a greenhouse of sorts, while everybody at the Lodge thinks the ritual worked. He tells Peggy Sue that he loves her and gives her the locket she wore at the beginning of the film. Realizing that she cannot cheat fate, Peggy Sue kisses Charlie and they begin to make love, which would again lead to Peggy getting pregnant and marrying him. In the next moment, Peggy Sue is transported back to present day.
Peggy Sue wakes up in a hospital, with Charlie at her side. However, the idea that she may have dreamed the entire ordeal is called into doubt when she sees that Michael has dedicated a book to her and their night together. Charlie, meanwhile, is deeply regretful of his adultery and tells Peggy Sue he wants her back. It seems there's hope for them possibly reconciling their differences when Peggy Sue looks at Charlie with new eyes and (citing a reference from her grandfather who claimed that her grandmother's strudel kept the family together) says, "I'd like to invite you over to your house for dinner on Sunday, with your kids. I'll make a strudel."
Read more about this topic: Peggy Sue Got Married
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)