Heartburn

Like a good relationship that goes sour, "Heartburn" is impossible to love but hard to write off entirely. Despite its fine cast and script by Nora Ephron, the film is disjointed and, ultimately, dishonest.

Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson play two Washington journalists who meet at a wedding, and — seemingly in the next scene — are saying their own vows. The developments that follow in their relationship are just as abrupt and just as believable. The rapid-fire pace of their many separations and reconciliations stretches credibility to the limit, and it's hard to generate any interest in these characters when it was never clear what drew them together in the first place.

Streep does a fine job as magazine writer Rachel, but Nicholson's cad is all too familiar in his role of Mark, the womanizing columnist. Supporting players Stockard Channing, Maureen Stapleton, Jeff Daniels and Kevin Spacey, while uniformly excellent, seem underutilized and distract from the main plot.

"Heartburn" is worth watching, if only for its strong cast, but it's as memorable as leftover lasagna.

This film is based on Nora Ephron's "novel". we're told, but the novel was a largely biographical depiction of her failed marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalist famous for his exposure of the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon,,a marriage which ended in divorce as a result of his long affair with a fellow journalist. The Carl Bernstein character, Mark Forman, is played by Jack Nicholson with his usual devilish, eyebrow-twitching, grinning charm but the film is carried by Meryl Streep as his long-suffering wife, whose character, writer Rachel Samstadt, seems to age without recourse to added lines or makeup or any of the usual Hollywood trickery but purely by a change of body-language and a certain implied physical heaviness. The film is well-served by its supporting players as well as its principals, notably Stockard Channing and Jeff Daniels. It's both moving and very funny and the fact that their first child, Annie, is played by Streep's real-life daughter makes the mother/child interaction natural and utterly charming.

The acting is superb by the whole cast and what could've become an over-dramatic film has wonderful moments of humor that works so well. Although the story is quite sad in parts the film is balanced out by a lot of humor. I found myself laughing out loud at this film a lot. Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson are brilliant, and Carly Simon wrote the soundtrack which is also great. It is still well worth watching.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

Just to watch Streep and Nicholson together in a movie is good enough for me. A lot of the scenes seemed kinda improvised. They're crazy good together. I always wondered why they weren't in more movies together. Who knows, maybe they didn't like each other very much in real life. Also, Nicholson always seems to be dancing between genius and insanity. Streep's more the straight-forward type. At least to me.

Nora Ephron who wrote this and the supposed autobiographical novel it's based on, wasn't known for immense depth, but for romance. I think every girl or woman who grew up before the start of this century is familiar with her work (Sleepless In Seattle, When Harry Met Sally etc.).

6.6/10 just for the main leads.

Although somewhat artificial, the humor and "heartburn" of this Nora Ephron film seem more affecting and less manufactured than those in her more slick subsequent films, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. Perhaps the autobiographical slant helped.

Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson play a couple based on Ephron and Carl Bernstein. They meet, marry, settle in Washington, and have children. Streep's wedding-day jitters, it turns out, were amply justified; she discovers an affair between her husband and a social-climbing hostess.

Streep is so luminous and so natural that one may not realize until the end of the film how completely insipid and devoid of any distinguishing qualities her character is. "Rachel" changes from a wan, nervous divorcee (before meeting Nicholson's character) to an obsessively devoted wife and mother who keeps babbling about how happy she is.

Nicholson is well-cast as the rakish but (initially) endearing husband. The supporting cast reflects the expert hand of Juliet Taylor, Woody Allen's longtime casting director, who peppered it with many familiar faces, including Allen favorites Joanna Gleason, Caroline Aaron, and Karen Akers. Maureen Stapleton is particularly droll as Streep's shrink. Nineties audiences will enjoy seeing Kevin Spacey as a neurasthenic mugger.

The comedy in the film is somewhat uneven, but often extremely engaging, as in a running parody of "Masterpiece Theatre." And compare the spontaneous bravado of Nicholson's lopsided rendition of "Soliloquy" from Carousel (the comic highlight) to the forced quirkiness of Meg Ryan's tone-deaf "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" in When Harry Met Sally...

It is some years since I saw this film, but I definitely thought at the time it was vastly under-rated, and now that I have seen the voter's scores for this, I am surprised all over again. Obviously, I have to log off and go to the video store to refresh my memory, but: the story was great, the song Joni Mitchell contributed was one of her all-time bests, and how could Meryl Streep ever be in anything that wasn't worthwhile? By the way, the book was better, punctuated with recipes. It is an autobiographical tale, which bursts the balloon of the Watergate heroes and is definitely one of the most entertaining and realistic of the cinematic versions of life and love.