Word: streep
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just got to wonder how calculating some movie studies are. Take the movie Heartburn, with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, two of the most acclaimed actors today. Mike Nichols, one of the eighties' hottest directors, controlled the process; and the screenplay was taken from a best-selling roman a clef by Nora Ephron, the former wife of big-shot Washington journalist Carl Bernstein. Hmmmm. Yeah, you know the producers were dreaming of a blockbuster and nine Academy awards from the moment they started shooting. With all that build-up, you've got to be disappointed...
...Heartburn is not a movie that will stick with you for the rest of your life; it is not a Casablanca of the eighties. But Heartburn is definitely one of the best dramatic movies of the year and to miss it would mean foregoing a chance to see Meryl Streep become Rachel, a woman based on Ephron herself...
Given such a plot, Heartburn would just be another one of a myriad of movies on failed marriage without such stellar actors. But Streep, with minimal help from Nicholson, makes it much more. With her hair dyed an unbecoming mousy brown and her nose more pronounced than her cheekbones, Streep is far from beautiful, but she is wonderful. She barely looks at the camera, focusing on what is real in Rachel's life, her children, her husband, her friends. Every gesture she makes seems unconscious and unplanned. When she feeds her child, spooning food out with one hand and absentmindedly...
...only times that Streep seems to be putting on an Academy Award performance, rather than taking you on a tour through the family album, are when she is with Nicholson. As Mark Forman, Nicholson gives a performance reminiscent of everything he has ever done. A little from Terms of Endearment, a little from Prizzi's Honor, even a bit from The Shining when Mark gets upset...
Acting captivates Sheedy, and she wants to play everything "from a nun to a safari adventurer to a peasant girl to Lady Macbeth." She can't, however, imagine herself trying something as difficult as Meryl Streep's tour de force in Sophie's Choice. "I don't think I could play a sex-starved rock singer," she speculates, pausing to see how that possibility strikes her listener. Then, grinning, she changes her mind: "But maybe I could." She is on view in two fairly routine films released this month, Blue City, a thriller in which she plays Judd Nelson...