August 4, 1999 | What was the Committee to Re-Elect the President? Why were people so concerned about an 18 ½-minute gap on a White House audiotape? How did G. Gordon Liddy become famous enough to get his very own talk-radio show? And, perhaps most important, who was Bobby Sherman and when was he a teen fave-rave?
If you can answer these questions correctly, you’re might have a great time with Dick, a prankishly iconoclastic comedy that mines the Watergate scandal of the 1970s for savvy satire and inspired foolishness. Don’t be surprised, however, if you discover you’re the only person in the theater who gets all of the jokes. The TV spots and coming-attractions trailers are selling Dick as teen-oriented entertainment, so it’s more than likely that most of the people who buy tickets neither know nor care about the real-life people and occurrences portrayed – or, to be more precise, lampooned – on screen.
Chalk it up to artistic integrity or mischievous eccentricity, or maybe even commercially suicidal tendencies. Whatever the reason, director Andrew Fleming (The Craft) and co-screenwriter Sheryl Longin have made a movie about teen-agers that has considerably more built-in appeal for baby-boomers and senior citizens.
Working from a conceit that seems equal parts Forrest Gump and Saturday Night Live, Fleming and Longin offer a cleverly askew view of historical events through the eyes of fictional bystanders. Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams) are two cute but clueless Washington, D.C. teen-agers who turn out to be the right people in the wrong place at the right time. Late one evening in 1972, they sneak out of Arlene’s apartment in the Watergate complex to mail an entry to a “Win a Date With Bobby Sherman” contest. While sneaking back up the stairs, they are frightened by their run-in with a cranky stranger — G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer) — who just happens to be coordinating the burglary-in-progress at the nearby Democratic National Committee headquarters.
A few days later, Betsy and Arlene spot Liddy during a field-trip tour of the White House. They also spot a scrap of paper stuck to his shoe — a document containing potentially embarrassing details about the Committee to Re-Elect the President – but the girls don’t appreciate its importance. (“Oh! It’s about something called CREEP. Must mean that everybody on the list is a creep, huh?) One thing leads to another, the girls are escorted to a White House conference room, and the Commander in Chief himself – President Richard M. Nixon (Dan Hedaya) — makes a surprise appearance.
At first, all the president’s men fear the two girls might be troublesome subversives – or, worse, Democrats. But presidential hatchet man Bob Halderman (Dave Foley) concludes, not entirely mistakenly: “I have met yams with more going on upstairs with these two.” So Nixon decides to pour on the charm, in the way that only he could pour on the charm that only he thought he possessed. Plotting to keep them in the dark and under scrutiny, he offers Betsy and Arlene jobs as White House dog walkers. Better still, he adds in a conspiratorial tone, he wants them to serve as his “secret youth advisers.”
All of which, of course, enables the girls to witness all manner of suspicious behavior – money laundering, document shredding, conversation taping – that they only gradually understand. At first, President Nixon – who insists that his young confidants address him as Dick – is able to satisfy their sporadic curiosity with plausible denials. (Those shredded documents? “Papier-mâché,” he explains. “It’s a hobby of mine.”) And long after even canned yams might begin to suspect that something is amiss, Arlene remains too lovestruck to notice anything incriminating – Dick replaces Bobby Sherman as her pin-up of choice – while Betsy does her resourceful best to help her draft-age brother by convincing Dick that “war is unhealthy for children and other living things.”
Dick would be amusing enough if it simply focused on the incremental enlightenment of the two dim bulbs winningly played by Dunst and Williams. (Arlene: “How dare these people keep treating us like stupid teen-age girls!” Betsy: “We are stupid teen-age girls!”) But the filmmakers increase the hilarity quotient by periodically placing the girls at the center of world-shaping events, which they unwittingly but substantially affect. Never mind what history books might tell you: These ditzy dog-walkers deserve full credit for leaking news of CREEP connivances to the Washington Post, and causing Presidential adviser John Dean’s crisis of conscience. With a little help from their “special recipe” cookies, they also mellow-out a bellicose Leonid Brezhnev during an arms-control summit.
Dick starts to run out of steam in its final half-hour, but it bounces back to high form just before the closing credits for a maliciously amusing last laugh. And even while the movie appears to be vamping until the next big giggle, Dan Hedaya proves to be much more than just a walking and talking sight gag. For all his transparent oiliness, and despite his frequent use of what the ditzy dog-walkers describe as “potty mouth” language, Hedaya’s Nixon comes across as haplessly buffoonish and, surprisingly, almost sympathetic. A nice touch: The infamous 18 ½-minute gap has nothing to do with a Watergate cover-up, and everything to do with something the President assumes would be far less forgivable — a White House sex scandal.
To their great credit, Fleming and Longin are willing to look beyond Nixon and his inner circle in their search for satirical targets. Indeed, they actually take a few well-aimed potshots at Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch), the celebrated Washington Post reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal. Think of it as a cinematic stripe of karmic counterbalance: Twenty-three years after they were deified as heroic newshounds in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein stumble through Dick as preening and pompous klutzes. Whether they are jealously hiding information from each other, or questioning an important source in an underground garage, they rarely refrain from bickering or swapping insults.
Speaking of important sources: Just wait until you find out the real reason why Woodward and Bernstein have never revealed the true identity of Deep Throat. If you think historical revisionism can’t be laugh-out-loud funny, then you don’t know Dick.
