Heartburn (1986)

#13 — Rachel Samstad, a New York food writer who is seduced and betrayed by a tomcat D.C. columnist.

This article was initially published at The Film Experience.

Matthew: The celebrated run of 80s-era films that rapidly cemented Meryl Streep as a master among screen actors is so overwhelmingly remembered for its cadre of fatal, self-sacrificing period heroines that it was only inevitable that Streep’s two comedic outings would recede into the background of her now four-decade career. Based on its critical reception alone, Streep’s 1989 Roseanne Barr match-up She-Devil, which we’ll get around to discussing in a few weeks, may very well deserve to be remembered as a curious career outlier — that is, if it deserves to be remembered at all. But what about Heartburn, the all-around more prestigious comic vehicle that occasioned Streep’s reunion with many of her early behind-the-scenes collaborators, not least of all her Silkwood director Mike Nichols and that film’s co-writer Nora Ephron, from whose thinly-veiled best-seller the film is adapted?

Published in 1983, Ephron’s debut novel infamously dramatized the breakdown of her four-year marriage to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, whose reputation as a serial philanderer was never entirely remedied following Ephron’s scathing depiction of the tumultuous affair that blew apart their domestic bliss. An engrossing and peppery read, Heartburn made Ephron a household name, but it also saddled her with an unwanted reputation, i.e. that of the vindictive literary oversharer shamelessly exploiting her private circumstances for public sympathy. Three years later, Ephron’s calamity received the cinematic treatment from a slew of tony filmmakers whose combined talents and unimpeachable credentials couldn’t deter a backlash that all but mirrored the novel’s sexist reception. (Roger Ebert’s review, a low point in this seminal critic’s career, chided Ephron for hewing too closely to her own life and lacking the “distance and perspective that good comedy needs.”) There’s an entire other piece to be written about the now-muted critical consensus around Ephron and the hypocrisy of condemning women writers for tackling their personal lives on the page. But let’s focus on Heartburn, which marks the first occasion since 1979’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan in which Streep played for laughs, without necessarily skimping on the suffering.

In Heartburn, Streep is the Ephron surrogate Rachel Samstad, a successful food journalist who tosses aside her career and rushes into marriage and motherhood with Mark Forman, a seductive newsman played by Jack Nicholson, a perfectly-cast, last-minute replacement for the totally unimaginable Mandy Patinkin, who was fired after a day’s work for his lack of chemistry with Streep. When their marriage implodes after Mark falls for a willowy D.C. socialite, Rachel goes into a tailspin and is forced to decide whether to commit to an uncommitted man or strike out on her own. What’s perhaps most surprising about Streep’s performance is that she’s not exactly playing Ephron, or at least the version of Ephron that was best-known at the time; one sees little of the irony-laden, cobralike confidence that Ephron evinced with unruffled ease in her public appearances, both then and in more recent years. Instead, Streep is unmistakably and credibly inhabiting a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, fleshing out the sort of lucid, finicky, and frazzled personality that might have been the point of focus within a madcap Pedro Almodóvar melee from that era. Ephron’s romantic travails might have actually provided an ideal story template for Almodóvar, who was flirting with the possibility of going Hollywood roughly around the time of Heartburn’s release. Although capably if not exceptionally helmed by Nichols, Heartburn could have easily been enlivened by Almodóvar’s giddy urge for envelope-pushing, boldly outrageous color palettes, and affectionately attentive eye for all of his characters. But I bring up Almodóvar not purely to air a retroactive fantasy, but to consider what Streep might have accomplished in the hands of riskier collaborators with whom she was a little less familiar, particularly in her comedies. Streep’s performance, the particulars of which I’ll dive into later, is far and away the best thing Heartburn has to offer, but there’s already an inescapable sense of mutual comfort in this Nichols-Ephron-Streep partnership that overrides the zestier, more erratic components of the character and prohibits the actress from taking more high-wire leaps in her first comedy in seven years, opting instead to (relatively) play it safe. What are your initial thoughts on Streep’s return to the genre?

John: In the early passages of Heartburn, I admittedly fell into the gap between Streep’s Rachel Samstad and Nora Ephron herself, doling out mental demerits for what I perceived as a too casual and un-Ephron-like interpretation of “Rachel.” Perhaps because this is the first time I am familiar with the biographical figure Streep is playing, I actually found Rachel’s earnest charm somewhat off-putting and offering little of Ephron’s sardonic and often deadpan comedic timing. For this, I laid some unfair blame on Streep, but maybe this just signals that Ephron wasn’t best suited to adapt her own material? Again, Nichols proves exceptionally capable of pushing, relaxing, shooting, dressing, and cutting Streep in such a way that shows her off as no director really had (or has), but, as you've suggested, is Heartburn too comfortable? Then again, somewhere between Rachel’s extended wedding stall-out and her attempts to name “baby” songs while eating pizza in bed with Nicholson, I almost forgot about Nora Ephron entirely and instead grew to admire and sometimes even love this familiar yet delightful Streep creation.

If nothing else, Heartburn is a trojan horse for some choice Streep line-readings, who works her wonted magic in an uneven yet intermittently comic screenplay. Whether it’s the the way she lowers her voice to admit, “My husband had hamsters,” or the completely serious way she cries, “You can’t get a decent bagel in Washington D.C.!” while hiding from her wedding, or the way she barks then quickly retreats during a phone call with her contractor (“Where the fuck have you been...? Oh. I’m so sorry. Cancer?”), Streep tosses off great lines without opting for the kind of showy theatrics that could have easily tipped her Rachel into a self-destructive, showboating parody of Ephron herself. Even in quieter moments — watching dust fly out of her couch, dying from boredom while stuck between two arguing men at a dinner party, or, in her best scene, realizing that her husband might be cheating in a zoom-in close-up while getting her hair done — Streep lends a grounded, naturalistic element to a film that’s often content having its cast play the comic tones as outright farce. Though I prefer the playful and vulnerable Streep of Joe Tynan, Heartburn reads as an early point in Streep’s career where her charisma and confidence signal the turns her star persona will later make and dispel those undue criticisms of her being an artificial or coreless actress. When Streep arrives onscreen, pale as snow and making eyes at Nicholson, she carries an assured and magnetic charge, that of an actress fully in tune with her powers.

Which is not to say that Streep never gets caught with the occasional exaggerated expression or broad line-reading in Heartburn, it’s just that she indulges less than anyone else for me to actually notice. I’d wager that Streep is too incongruous a screen presence to play the romantic opposite to Jack Nicholson, whose carefree chill makes her seem affected and whose manic outbursts inevitably shirk Streep’s own capacity for volcanic outrage. It doesn’t help that their relationship is streamlined and abridged in such a way that Heartburn often feels like a character study disguised as a two-handed rom-com. “Can we get someone else to do it?” Streep hilariously cries out en-route to deliver her first newborn, and sure, I briefly fantasized about Stockard Channing’s Rachel Samstad (a formidable, playful but no-nonsense match to Nicholson) or even Diane Keaton’s (although Streep is doing her own neurotic variation, the real-deal queen of comic anxiety might have truly rocked this part). But who cares? When you’re Meryl Streep, you make it work, because that’s what you do; you’re a pro at recovering iffy projects, enlivening incomplete characters on the page to multi-dimensional beings on celluloid, sinking into the milieu of a film all while retaining an unmistakably charismatic knack for honest emoting, and, of course, for pieing a philanderer in the face.

Matthew: Streep definitely excels most in Rachel’s introspective scenes of near-stillness and silence, as opposed to the broader, more outrightly comedic set-ups in which she occasionally comes across as an actress stretching her natural tendencies and sacrificing specificity based on the presumed demands of the genre. (I’m thinking, in particular, of Streep’s outsized reactions to Nicholson during his kitchen-door freakout and all of those pursed-lip, bug-eyed looks she throws at Kevin Spacey’s burglar on the 1 train.) Ephron’s tart writing is undone by her erratic inclination towards questionable, momentary shtick, which keeps lifting Streep out of moods and moments before she can really hit the sweet spot of a scene, plopping her down into scenarios (like the robbery at Rachel’s group therapy session or the motif of an imagined television host narrativizing Rachel’s misery) that are scripted and played for laughs but reveal very little of Rachel’s actual character. In that regard, there’s something incompletely realized about Streep’s performance, which isn’t to say it’s at all deprived of some really inspired moments.

It’s a sidelong pleasure to watch Streep squirm and magnetize underneath Nicholson’s wolfish gaze during an opening meet-cute at the wedding of mutual friends. The “baby song” scene you mentioned before is a real keeper, not least because Streep and Nicholson utterly nail the bewilderingly intimate spousal conversation that seems to exist on an entirely different wavelength from one’s normal interactions and can be uncomfortable, even unnerving, to the outside spectator. To his credit, Nicholson isn’t just a prop for Ephron’s biting send-up, but a believably flawed and not wholly irredeemable operator who keeps Streep alert and on her toes at every instance. His diminished presence, post-discovery, is necessary to the film’s narrative but really a loss to the film’s momentum, which cannot help but drag once his screwball spark is pushed to the periphery. Streep recovers that energy in key moments, like a stroll through the supermarket with Catherine O’Hara’s Southern busybody in which Rachel concocts some malicious lies about her romantic rival; in this scene, Streep’s highly-charged, barely-veiled, and comically-pliable outrage comes closest to achieving the Almodóvar-adjacent movie that Heartburn could have been.

And yet, it’s the poignant moments of the performance that I find myself admiring most. A late-film conversation with a jeweler that unearths a discovery meant to re-pique Rachel’s latent rage is instead adeptly underplayed by Streep, who deepens the scene by hinting at her character’s humiliation while primarily focusing on her courtesy, summoning up a cheery, smiling, and shrugging demeanor whose perceptible cracks say more about the emotional limits of deceiving oneself than any monologue ever could. The pie-to-the-face that follows that encounter is a truly delicious climax but also another feat of shrewd understatement. It’s one of the rare and seminal moments in Heartburn in which Ephron’s messy structure and Nichols’ penchant for long, unbroken takes yield some loose, spontaneous choices from Streep, whose sense of figuring out a scene in the moment — feeling its particulars and taking the temperature of a room while seemingly living inside her own head — works quite well for a character in the midst of figuring out her path in life. By localizing Heartburn within Rachel’s headspace and ensuring that this unlikely heroine’s sadness and hard-won resilience are discernible above all else, Streep pays ultimate tribute to a talent who, to quote another of the actress’ dearly-departed pals, took her broken heart and made it into art.

John: “I never expected to love it so much. It’s like you expand. You have so much more love to give,” Rachel tells her pal Stockard Channing about giving birth to her first baby, played by her then-infant daughter Mamie. Though she had played mothers before and will play them continually again, Streep’s performance in Heartburn reminded me of that sizable component of her persona as a maternal figure, both on and offscreen. It’s no secret that Streep is selective with her roles, but viewers don’t often recall that Streep tries to select projects that would accommodate time for her family and ensure proximity to them. Falling in Love and Heartburn, two films with small but present question-marks about Streep’s involvement in the material, both shot in New York, where she and Don and their children lived until the early 90s. When filming Out of Africa, Streep moved her family to Kenya for the summer, and when the shooting schedule ran over a month and into September, Streep recalls being devastated by not being able to be home for her children’s first month of school. The list of rejected roles Streep must have pushed aside to be close to her kids in their formative years is probably longer than Infinite Jest. It’s surprising that Mamie is even in the film at all, as Streep is fiercely protective of her family’s right to privacy; but note how Mamie is credited here as “Natalie Stern,” an alias Streep used to protect Mamie’s anonymity. Streep’s mother and brother are also credited as party guests, the only such instance in her filmography.

From Joanna Kramer to Sophie Zawistowski, Rachel to Lindy, Francesca to Kate Gulden, from Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw to Ricki Randazzo, Streep’s role as a mother foregrounds a good chunk of her performances, and when considering her tremendous faculties for authentic emotional responses, her notorious generosity with scene-partners, her commitment to modeling respect and kindness for the next generation of actresses, Streep’s maternal proclivities make perfect sense. Rachel Samstat might not be at the pantheon level of Meryl as Mother performances, but Heartburn made me feel, above all else, the sheer joy and comfort of Streep’s bountiful love, for her characters, her castmates, and for her on and offscreen family. When Rachel records her newborn’s first word, I completely believed that “da-da” was the very first thing that came out of that baby’s mouth, and I would not be shocked to learn if the scene were an actual, spontaneous account of Mamie’s real-life first utterance. Streep’s ecstatic reaction is like a warm embrace, like some activation of my muscle memory after watching a home-video and feeling that jubilation replayed in your senses once again. Nora Ephron would find this sentence nauseating, but I’ll confess that, for me, Meryl Streep shows, above all else, from role to role, on celluloid and in the flesh, what it means and feels like to love.