My Year with Meryl Streep: Heartburn (1986)
A look at the underwhelming marital comedy-drama that teamed Meryl for the first time with Jack Nicholson!
I recently spent a whole year watching a Meryl Streep film every week, and I thought I’d share with you some of the reviews I wrote for her many classic films!
Heartburn (1986)
Sandwiched in between her serious, occasionally effective dramatic work — 1985′s Plenty and Out of Africa, and Ironwood and A Cry in the Dark, released in 1987 and 1988, respectively — was a lighter piece of entertainment directed by Mike Nichols and written by Nora Ephron, based on her novel. Nichols, Ephron, and Meryl had collaborated on Silkwood three years prior, and this time the gang came together to tell a much more personal story to Ephron, as well as to see if sparks would be captured on screen when Meryl played off Jack Nicholson on screen for the first time.
What Heartburn ultimately turned into was a film that marked one of Meryl’s few critical duds of the 1980s, a movie deemed a major disappointment by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and one of the few films Meryl made in this decade that didn’t receive a single major awards nomination.
