Love's Something You Fall in Heartburn

By RICHARD CORLISS

How could they ever have believed it would work? Both Rachel Samstat (Meryl Streep) and Mark Forman (Jack Nicholson) had been through this marriage stuff before, unsuccessfully. She was a chronic worrywart; he was a legendary sexual goat. "I don't believe in marriage," she said. "Neither do I," he replied. Only one of them was joking. And yet they did have fun. She made him salads at 4 in the morning; he made her laugh with a manic-heroic rendition of Soliloquy from Carousel. He would be, she thought, just the guy to offer sex, schmoozing and comic relief, between babies. Oh, yes, and they were famous, at least in the emerald ghettos of Manhattan and Georgetown. For Heartburn was a smart, tattling novel pretty much about its author, the saucy wit Nora Ephron, and her second husband, Watergate Wonder Boy Carl Bernstein.

Heartburn is now a movie, one sure to stoke controversy because of a comic tone that swerves deftly from affection to irony to flippancy to icy revenge. In its portrayal of Rachel, who needs so much love, and Mark, who wants too much sex, the film may seem to suggest that all women are fools and all men knaves. In fact, it says that nothing is sadder than enduring the death of romance, and nothing more wryly poignant than looking at it from the outside. In Heartburn (as in Kramer vs. Kramer), the "outside" is the tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party. The viewer, who is vouchsafed all Rachel's perceptions and prejudices, is never told Mark's reasons for seeking solace in the bed of a society hostess while his wife is seven months pregnant. But nobody said life or art had to be fair. Only true and painful and funny. In its wicked, lopsided way, Heartburn fills the bill. "Love's something you fall in," wrote Playwright Terry Johnson. For Heartburn to work, the moviegoer must fall in love with Mark, as Rachel does, then fall out with a crash. So why are these opposites attracted to each other? Not because Rachel is a food writer and Mark is a Washington columnist. But because, up there on the screen, Rachel is Meryl Streep, swathed in easy glamour, and Mark is that cuddly predator Jack Nicholson. Heartburn is a movie about old- fashioned Hollywood star quality -- the sort that, say, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant radiated almost 50 years ago in another love-and-divorce comedy, The Awful Truth -- and about how the glow of celebrity can blind anyone, especially a spouse, to the black hole of secret sins. What woman doesn't want to believe she is marrying a star? What man doesn't want to believe he is one? It is love's first innocent deception and the basis for the lies and shattered dreams that often follow. Marriages may begin like royal weddings, but at least for Rachel, life together isn't a happily-ever-after on The Late Show. It's more like Creature Features.

The author of Heartburn was born knowing about star quality and its discontents; she is the daughter of Screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who put funny endearments into the mouths of Tracy and Hepburn (Desk Set) and adapted Carousel for Hollywood. In Mike Nichols, Ephron fille has found the perfect director for her skewering humor. Once he invigorated cabaret comedy as half of the Nichols and May team; now he orchestrates the romantic abrasions of Nicholson-Streep and the nifty cameos of Steven Hill as Rachel's flighty dad and John Wood as a nightmare Alistair Cooke. Generous and precise, Nichols shoots many scenes in long takes, observing the characters like a decorous dinner guest. Always alert to gestural cinema, he takes his time following the tentative caress of a friend's hand on Rachel's swollen belly, or a mother's joy and responsibility as she leads her little daughter up the steps of a plane.

The novel relied on Ephron's cauterizing prose to anchor the reader; the movie's commentary is the dialogue that Streep's fine, suggestive face carries on with the viewer. Stranded in rage, this Rachel has only the camera as her therapist, and Streep will turn to it as to a friend, confiding a querulous eyebrow or subtle grimace, simultaneously inhabiting and commenting on her role. Nicholson has a tougher assignment. He is, here, only half a man, all surface and no substance, and finally he distances himself from Mark, his face going slack in a kind of moral torpor. But when he smiles at Rachel like a cat with Tweety Pie feathers on his lips or croons nonsense to his firstborn, Nicholson reveals the charm that hides the folly. You can hate Mark for his cruelty or love him for his robust grace and fine, sharp humor. Same with this movie.