David Thomson

“Peggy Sue . . . is Kathleen Turner. The makeup department may insist they did an extensive and subtle job to help her look both older and younger than Turner's actual age. I couldn't detect it. Instead, I felt that Turner (who is 32) looks far too young to have her daughter in the movie (Helen Hunt, 22), and impossibly mature to have Barbara Harris as her mother in the falshbacks . . . It would be a tough stretch for any actress--the best solution might have been not makeup but the sort of romantic stylization that Coppola often excels in. As it is, he has elected the "extra" comedy of having a 32-year-old plopped down in her own 18-year-old life, with nobody remarking on the disparity…. [I just assumed everyone else saw Peggy Sue differently than we did; it was an illusion.]

“…. Peggy Sue is glum that her marriage has come apart, and Kathleen Turner works hard to involve us. She is winning, until we see that her husband is Nicolas Cage--like Newman and Cruise [in The Color of Money], Turner and Cage shouldn't be in the same film, much less as lovers. There's no chemistry between them; there's not even a shared approach to performance. Turner cannot conceal her sophistication, her resources of irony, intelligence and warmth. Cage, on the other hand, is far less accomplished an actor. He drifts and blurs in front of our eyes; he seems to believe in the sincerity of uncertainty and improvisation. He looks so unsuitable for her that we are ready to be witnesses at the divorce. It's as if Myrna Loy in The Thin Man had Ronald Reagan as her Nick Charles….

“It's nothing against Turner to wonder if [Debra] Winger might have been better as Peggy Sue. Winger is a wilder comedienne; she is less assured and therefore more vulnerable than Turner. Her style could have made contact with Cage's real age. More helpful still, her looks are more romantically unstable, and her temperament is more inclined to inhabit the craziness of the situation here.

“Of course, we don't enjoy that wealth of opportunity. We have a situation in which a Debra Winger--the best young film actress around--ends up in the mortifying Legal Eagles and not in Peggy Sue. That's another measure of how difficult it is to sustain coherent careers today. I can't guess what reasons of back injury, deal making, arrogance and insecurity put Winger in one film and not in another. Hindsight casing is easier for everyone. But Peggy Sue needed a touch of screwball, and Winger's comic potential has not yet been tapped.”

David Thomson
California Magazine, Nov. 1986

"…. In Peggy Sue Got Married . . . there was the real burden of having to be nice and sweet, without too much irony, for a director who has a poor record with women on screen. She was also a late replacement for Debra Winger….”

Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Third Edition (1994), p 760