Dinner and a Movie: ‘Heartburn’

Welcome to our Dinner and a Movie series, where we feature nostalgic essays on some of our favorite films from the '80s and '90s, and share recipes inspired from movie moments.

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Heartburn isn’t your typical love story. Although the 1986 film begins, in the love-licked first scenes, at a wedding, you might be convinced that this movie adaptation is a simple love story. It starts with Carly Simon’s tinny “Coming Around Again” on background, a close-up of dewy ’80s faces in pews, puffed chiffon dresses undulating through the church, a sea of pastel flowers in towering vases.

The wedding is where we meet New York magazine food writer Rachel Samstat (a stand-in for the book and film’s author, Nora Ephron, played by the exacting Meryl Streep) and Washington columnist Mark Forman (a cad played to a tee by Jack Nicholson). Ah, it is a romance, even in the very first image, that frames the destined couple in the doorway to the church. Lovers they are meant to be, and there will be, in due time, carbonara in bed, transformative rice pudding and romance in a falling-down house with mediocre pizza and complaints about a no-goodnik contractor. Love, marriage and a baby carriage are in the literally pregnant air.

Rachel (played by Meryl Streep) gets cold feet and bemoans to multiple friends and family, including Vera (played by Maureen Stapleton) about getting married again. And then gets married again.

Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

And then, an affair.

This movie is compelling — some might even say delicious — and not just because of the food that plays the narrative’s necessary third character, charting Rachel’s emotional landscape as we follow her love story (excitement! possibility! baby! inevitable heartburn!). It’s delicious because, once Mark Forman does what we expect him to do, fulfilling the role of on-screen bad boy by cheating on his beloved with Thelma Rice — and mimicking the real-life affair between Carl Bernstein and Margaret Jay — Rachel Samstat turns out just fine.

'Heartburn' Recipes

To honor Nora Ephron’s celebrated film, try these delicious dishes.

Spaghetti Carbonara

Chocolate Cream Pie

During the movie’s heavier moments, we hope that Mark will just get it together. We hope that Thelma will just fall into a sinkhole and disappear. We hope that our heroine will just find love. Or maybe we hope that she will just find out the truth, no matter how miserable it is.

And then she does. Our slightly disheveled Rachel finds proof of the ongoing affair, upending a drawer of Mark’s secrets, confronting him with them. He hasn’t changed his ways. Will she stay? The film’s teaser leads you to believe that the love story here is between Rachel and Mark. It isn’t. The love we’re looking for isn’t in the non-contrite face of our ne’er do well Mark. He’ll never find redemption. The love story is Rachel’s, and she has to learn to create it for herself.