Heartburn Reviews

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but a film combining the talents of Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, and Mike Nichols should not be this flabby and shapeless. Heartburn begins with a good foundation, but quickly crumbles once we realize it’s main character is going to project all of the blame for the failed relationship on her partner, and scene after scene will not add up to a satisfying conclusion.

Perhaps the fault of this lies squarely at the foot of Nora Ephron, who wrote the screenplay based upon her thinly disguised autobiographical novel. There’s never any believable or reasonable explanation for these two characters to attract each other, marry, or continually orbit each other’s lives. The script also begins to unravel as an episodic structure develops and we quickly realize that these scenes are not going to build upon each other into a coherent narrative. This rambling, shaggy structure works fine for a novel in which slices of life moments can reveal character depths or inner monologues, but that freewheeling structure is hard to translate to film. A tighter control is needed to wrangle all of the moving parts into a whole that feels complete. Heartburn doesn’t have that guiding hand.

While Streep and Nichols typically work magic together, and present her with a flawed, interesting character, too many of the other actors are wasted. Nicholson is stuck with a thinly drawn figure, one that we’re supposed to hiss at more than we understand. Consistently strong supporting players like Maureen Stapleton and Catherine O’Hara are given roles that look like plum parts before eventually just disappearing. They do solid work with what little they’re given to do, but this is mostly a film for Streep to suffer, cry, fall into anxious fits, regain strength, then shove a pie in her husband’s face. It’s not a very exciting film, and I only watched it as a major fan of Nichols, Nicholson, and Streep. Unless you're also a major fan of those three, I don’t really know if I can recommend giving this one a spin.

I already saw this movie but since it was a while back and since I have it on DVD, I thought I might as well check it out again. Well, to be honest, it is a rather obscure feature and it is rather forgotten nowadays but anything directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson was pretty much a must see in my book. Eventually, even though the performances were decent enough (Would you expect anything else Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson?), unfortunately, the story was rather weak. Apparently, it was based on the life of Nora Ephron and her failed marriage with Carl Bernstein, the famous journalist involved in the Watergate scandal. Even though thus concept was not necessarily bad, in fact , you realize pretty quickly that the whole thing was seriously one-sided (Basically, the wife is a poor victim and the husband is worthless unreliable cheater) and it didn’t result in a really rewarding watch. To make things worse, neither of these characters was really interesting and what they were going through was just seriously generic and therefore not really spellbinding either. A year later, Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson would work again together in the movie ‘Ironweed’ which I haven’t seen yet but it seems slightly more promising than this feature. Anyway, to conclude, it’s too bad because this movie had some potential but, in spite of its flaws, it is still worth a look though, especially if you are interested in Meryl Streep or in Jack Nicholson.