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You'd have thought that Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols had remade
Heaven's Gate: that was the critical reaction to this film version of Ephron's semiautobiographical novel about her own marital woes. The fact that they had Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep playing thinly disguised versions of Carl Bernstein and Ephron probably made them bigger, fatter targets. In fact, the film was a genuinely funny and painful look at the effects of marital infidelity and divorce, in the story of two married writers and what happens when the pregnant wife finds out the husband has been fooling around behind her back. The film is more dramatic and less quip-filled than Ephron's novel, which made the Ephron character a food writer and was peppered with recipes. Nicholson stepped into his role at the last minute, when Nichols fired Mandy Patinkin for being too intense and not funny enough.
--Marshall Fine
Review
This well-crafted but disappointing comedy-drama has talent to burn on both sides of the camera but is curiously uninvolving. The major reason for this lies in Nora Ephron's script, which never presents any believable reason for the two main characters to be interested in each other, much less married. This script also suffers from a diffuse, episodic structure that fritters away much of the story's potential for comedic or dramatic moments by lingering on everyday events that do nothing to reveal the characters or push the story forward. As a result, the actors have little to work with: The pairing of Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson seems like a match made in heaven but their sketchily drawn characters keep them from ever connecting in a meaningful way. A few of the support players generate sparks, most notably Catherine O'Hara as a gossipy queen-bee type, but none of them ever get enough screen time to make a lasting impression or enhance the threadbare narrative. Director Mike Nichols manages to create a handful of memorable scenes (the best is when the two leads trade songs about babies after discovering they're having one of their own) but can't triumph over the lackluster script. As a result, Heartburn is neither funny nor dramatic enough to satisfy most audiences and can only be recommended to devoted fans of Streep or Nicholson. ~ Donald Guarisco, All Movie Guide
