David Edelstein

"Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson evidently like each other a great deal, but they shouldn't act together any more because their styles don't mesh. Streep makes a point of going to a role, and making you well aware of the distance between her and it [I disagree]--and, thus, of the prodigiousness of her feat. Jack Nicholson brings a role to himself; you watch him and say, "That's Jack," even if the role he's playing differs substantially from other roles he has played. Watching the two of them in a scene, you have to refocus constantly to make them fit together: you look at Nicholson, and you want to be close enough to study his face; then you look at Streep, and you want to leap back to the second balcony, the better to savor her formidable theatrics.

"A good director might have minimized these differences--or even acknowledge them and made them a source of comedy--but in Ironweed the two have been left to their own devices, and as performers, they flail and expire...."

[I don't have second page of review]
David Edelstein
Village Voice, December 22, 1987