Heartburn (1986)

“He had hamsters named Arnold and Shirley. And he was always whipping up little salads for them in the Slice-O-Matic and buying them extremely small sweaters at a pet boutique in Rego Park. Also, there was a certain amount of talking in squeaky voices. ” – Rachel

Number of Times Seen – 2 (28 Jun 2012 and 10 Aug 2016)

Brief Synopsis – A look at the marriage and life of a prominent journalist and a budding writer that is based on the life of Nora Ephron and her husband Carl Bernstein.

My Take on it – After watching this film, I heard about the recent HBO Documentary about Nora Ephron’s life and that film illuminated me to so much more about what this film is about then one could see without that knowledge.

Any collaboration between Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson obviously will be great, but the added touch of Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel helps move this up a bit more.

I always knew that many of the traits of Sally in When Harry Met Sally (1989) were based on Ephron, but this movie shows many more traits to us.

We get to see so much of her life, her marriages and how they affected her, her family and her own personality.

The characters become quite vivid and because they are mostly based on real people and real events they feel even more three dimensional and believable.

The fact that this film deals with a pretty messed up divorce meant that I would obviously encounter scenes that would hit closer to home for me and some of those scenes even made my heart skip a beat because they felt so real.

Bottom Line – Steep and Nicholson are both great here. Having seen Everything is Copy (2015), this movie is even funnier because there are so many aspects of Ephron’s life, marriages and personality in all of the characters.  It says so much about problematic marriages and there were scenes which made my heart miss a beat because they hit so close to home for me. Recommended!

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – In Everything is Copy, his 2015 documentary about his mother Nora Ephron’s life and career, Jacob Bernstein reveals that contentious negotiations over the movie adaptation of her novel Heartburn extended his parents’ divorce for actual years longer than most divorces take. Eventually, their divorce agreement included a stipulation that the movie was not allowed to depict the “Mark Forman” (Carl Bernstein) character as anything but a good, loving, and conscientious father (whatever his failings as a faithful husband were), and Heartburn’s director, Mike Nichols, had to be named as a legal signatory to the divorce.  (From IMDB)

Rating – Globe Worthy

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