Dick Review
by "Steve Rhodes" (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)August 1st, 1999
DICK
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
Do you remember Deep Throat? No, not that Deep Throat. (Our audience went into little ripples of nervous laughter every time the name was mentioned.)
Is your knowledge of President Richard "Dick" Nixon and his Watergate scandal detailed enough that you can recall all of the major participants and their precise roles in this national tragedy?
If so, then you are in the target audience for Andrew Fleming's DICK -- assuming that you like teen satires.
With perhaps the most limited demographics for a movie this year, DICK is going to have a hard time appealing to those with less than a completely firm grasp of Watergate history. Most of the jokes work only if you remember exactly how each of the people looked and acted. Saul Rubinek, for example, does a masterful turn as Henry Kissinger, but his performance is funny only if you can remember Kissinger well enough to pick up the subtle nuances of Rubinek's mannerisms.
Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin's clever script posits that the identity of the secret Deep Throat, who was sort of the Linda Tripp of that scandal, was none other than the "official White House dog walkers," two 15-year-olds named Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams). The story answers other questions about the scandal as well. The famous 18 1/2 minutes of blank tape was due to Arlene's having left a love note and song (her rendition of the Olivia Newton-John song "I Honestly Love You") to her would-be boyfriend, President Nixon. He erased it figuring that even the hint of an affair with a young White House aide could get him in more trouble than the cover-up of a third-rate burglary.
Dan Hedaya plays President Nixon as a lovable ditz. Looking like a cartoon version of the infamous president, Dan Hedaya gives a remarkably sympathetic portrayal of a man riding through a political hurricane of his own making. The president gives Betsy and Arlene some bogus jobs when they stumble into the burglary and its cover-up.
Of the nice casting, none is better than Dave Foley (A BUG'S LIFE and BLAST FROM THE PAST) as Bob Haldeman. Looking comically creepy, Foley furrows his brow while interviewing Betsy and Arlene in order to determine their intentions. "Ladies, when you think of your president, do you think friendly thoughts?" he interrogates them across a conference room table in the White House.
The humor tries its best to be topical. After Nixon resigns, the girls figure that nothing like this will ever happen again. "It's going to be different now," Arlene decides. "They'll never lie to us again," Betsy agrees.
The period costumes of wildly colorful clothes for the kids and awkwardly bad suits for the adults are a treat, but most of the movie is just a curiosity piece. In between sporadically funny scenes, you keep wondering why they made it at all.
Some of the choices for humor are quite bizarre. The film makes those two journalistic icons, Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch), into two comedic buffoons. Woodward and Bernstein as a doofus duo? The mind boggles.
DICK runs 1:35. It is rated PG-13 for sex-related humor, drug content and language and would be acceptable for kids 10 and up.
My son Jeffrey, age 10, gave it **, complaining that the plot was stupid. He said that Dave Foley and the girls did a good job, and he found the clothing interesting.
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