“Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986)
As a unit, we at the Playlist are “Youth Without Youth” apologists, but if anyone’s looking for an infinitely less indulgent, more accessible, frothy, pinkly sugared take on a few of the same topics, Coppola provided one all the way back in the mid-eighties, namely “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Starring Kathleen Turner as Peggy Sue, the film is also notable for being one of the very rare occasions (“The Rain People” probably being the other) when Coppola, usually so attuned to examining masculine ego, hubris and grand folly, tells his story from a female perspective. And it works surprisingly well, as Peggy Sue feels like a real woman and is given a kind of agency that is not just due to her modernity, when she gets mysteriously transported back her 1950s teenagerhood, but that marks her out as a quirky, individual character; a woman of disappointed dreams and untapped potential. Also starring Coppola’s nephew Nicolas Cage in an early defining role (the next year would bring lead roles in “Raising Arizona” and “Moonstruck”) and featuring Joan Allen, Helen Hunt and Jim Carrey in supporting roles, ‘Peggy Sue’ is to be sure not a particularly deep film, but it does have a lot of heart and a kind of sincere optimism beneath its “second chance” premise. It can also be seen as Coppola’s minor course-correction after a string of box office failures ranging from underperformers to catastrophes: the film went on to be Coppola’s first real hit since “Apocalypse Now.” It’s also the first time he really foregrounded the idea of the passage of time, the cruelty it can inflict and the wisdom it can foster, and here Coppola additionally finds the perfect home for his affectionate nostalgia toward his own 1950s coming of age. Perhaps an outlier in Coppola’s canon purely because it’s so undemanding, sweet and so uncomplicatedly fond of all its characters, “Peggy Sue Got Married” hints at how Coppola was becoming less an auteur than a director-for-hire but still had enough flair and personality to assure us that it’s anyone but a journeyman behind the camera. [B]
“Gardens Of Stone” (1987)
Forgotten even by the standards of some of Coppola’s other work of the 1980s and 1990s, “Gardens Of Stone” sees the director return to the war in Vietnam eight years after “Apocalypse Now,” but from a very different viewpoint. It’s a sober and worthy picture with an excellent cast, but the comparison to the earlier military masterpiece certainly does it no favors. Based on the book by Nicholas Proffitt and adapted by Ron Bass, it centers on the surrogate father/son relationship between weary career soldier Lt. Hazard (James Caan, who’s excellent here), and combat-hungry Specialist Willow (D.B. Sweeney, less so), who serve together in the “Old Guard,” providing the ceremonial duties at funerals of fallen soldiers in Arlington Cemetery. Willow is desperate to serve in Vietnam despite just marrying his childhood sweetheart (Mary Stuart Masterson), but Hazard, having served there, believes it’s a terrible war and tries his best to keep the boy alive. It’s a delicate and uncharacteristically somber picture from Coppola, directed without much in the way of flourish and focused mostly on the performances. Which are for the most part very strong: this is probably one of Caan’s finest hours, and reliable supporting performers like Angelica Huston, James Earl Jones, Dean Stockwell, Elias Koteas and ‘Apocalypse’ veterans Sam Bottoms and Laurence Fishburne all do strong work. The film doesn’t quite hang together, somehow, but that’s understandable: the director was in pre-production when his 22-year-old son Gian-Carlo was killed in a speedboat accident (Ryan O’Neal’s son Griffin, originally cast in Sweeney’s part, was responsible for the incident, and was recast as a result). That knowledge gives the film’s portrayal of grief, and of fathers and sons, added pathos, but it also perhaps explains why Coppola’s heart may not have been in it. [B-]
“Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988)
One of the more bafflingly overlooked entries in Coppola’s oeuvre, “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” is a bold, boisterous biopic of Preston Tucker (played by a crackling Jeff Bridges), a visionary postwar car designer whose story Coppola turns into a feel-good American myth. Originally envisioned as an experimental musical biography (these elements were, thankfully, scrapped), ‘Tucker’ is instead an earnest exploration of a man who shares more than a few character traits with Coppola himself —a mind towards newfangled technology, an anti-authoritarian streak, a lack of fiscal responsibility (you can’t help but think of Coppola when someone snaps of Tucker, “no matter how much he makes, he manages to spend twice as much”) and a deep belief in the power of family. And while some of the more outré ideas that Coppola originally had in mind for the film were abandoned, “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” still has a number of fairly insane stylistic flourishes —the Capra-esque educational film framework and narration, some nifty transitions (after Preston bemoans that he might have “ringside seats to your own crucifixion,” Coppola immediately cuts to a giant T being hoisted into the sky), and a great use of on-set “split-screen” (with two actors speaking on the phone to each other, from different locations on the same soundstage). This was a story that Coppola had been dying to tell from a young age (his father was one of the first investors in Tucker’s car) but he was only able to get the film financed when George Lucas, while on the set of “Captain EO” (see below), offered to fund the entire production himself. Later Coppola bemoaned that the movie wasn’t what he could have accomplished during his artistic peak, but that doesn’t really matter: “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” is a minor classic, full of outstanding performances (from the likes of Martin Landau, Joan Allen, Elias Koteas, and in the movie’s most haunting sequence, Dean Stockwell as Howard Hughes), jazzy music (courtesy of Joe Jackson) and a singularly irreverent, zippy wackiness that is positively infectious. [B+]
