Film review by Kevin Patterson
DICK Rating: *** (out of four) PG-13, 1999 Director: Andrew Fleming Screenplay: Andrew Fleming & Sheryl Longin Starring Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, Dan Hedaya
DICK is the best kind of stupid movie: the kind that knows it's stupid. It is the work of filmmakers who have thrown all credibility to the wind in favor of going for one ridiculous gag after another. Most of the jokes work, and when one doesn't, you still have to admire them for even trying it in the first place.
The film takes as its title the moniker of former President Richard Nixon, who is one of many targets in this screwball satire. Its premise is that Deep Throat, the mysterious informant who provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with crucial leads in the Watergate case, was in fact the pair of Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams), a couple of dimwitted teenage girls who didn't even understand what they had discovered. They had been at the hotel at the night of the break-in, but they didn't realize what was going on, and it is only after a paranoid G. Gordon Liddy (is that redundant?) noticed them at the White House later that they began to stumble across the shady dealings. Convinced that they were spies, Liddy had them taken aside from their school field trip to a private study, where Nixon and Bob Haldeman cooked up the idea of making them official White House dog-walkers to keep them quiet. The irony, of course, is that they had no useful information until they were brought inside the White House in order to keep them from leaking information.
At this point, the history of the last two years of the Nixon presidency unfolds as a comedy of errors. The pullout from Vietnam, for example, is another concession to the girls, after one of them solemnly tells Nixon, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." Unique explanations are offered for some of the more peculiar details of the scandal, such as the missing 18-1/2 minutes on the Oval Office tape, which is caused, indirectly, by Arlene's schoolgirl crush on the President. Woodward and Bernstein, meanwhile, turn out to be childish idiots, squabbling with each other over who gets to be on the telephone with the girls (their initial phone call to the newspaper was only meant to be a prank) and what not. When Woodward meets with them in an empty garage, a noise is heard in the background and they fear they've been followed. And they have--by Bernstein, whose pratfall off his bicycle accounted for the noise.
All of this, of course, is absurd (though I do wonder if the details of the real Watergate scandal would seem believable if they hadn't actually happened). But everyone involved seems to know it's absurd, and neither director Andrew Fleming nor any of the performers take any of it remotely seriously. While there is, of course, an element of political satire present, most of it is fairly obvious, as the filmmakers are by and large unconcerned with maintaining any connection to reality, opting instead to create their own deranged screwball universe. All in all, this movie really has more in common with AIRPLANE! than it does with DR. STRANGELOVE.
Needless to say, DICK is not exactly what one would call a classic. I regard it in much the same light as this year's SOUTH PARK feature film, as an inventive, amusing, and largely inconsequential comedy (though far less vulgar). Profound it ain't, but at least it made me laugh.
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