It was a good comedy idea. What if "Deep Throat", the White House source behind the revelations of the Watergate scandal, was actually a pair of gushing, dim-witted teenage girls? But other than providing a nostalgic glimpse of the culture and fashions of the 1970s, Dick misses the mark.
Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlen (Michelle Williams) are inseparable, clueless high school students who stumble upon the President during a tour of the White House. Having caught his staff in criminal acts, Nixon cons their silence by making them his 'Secret Youth Advisors' and 'Official White House Dog Walkers'. But they learn the truth about Nixon after playing one of his covert tapes, and their sabotage of his Presidency becomes deliberate rather than merely accidental.
The made-for-cable film Elvis Meets Nixon was the first sign that the former President would be culturally remembered as a comic caricature. Dick continues that process. Dan Hedaya's imitation depicts Nixon as a cross between Ed Sullivan and Christopher Lloyd, his clumsy social behavior masking a psyche of paranoia and vengefulness.
Those familiar with Watergate, its players, scandals and chronology, will get more out of Dick. But just because a reference is understood does not necessarily make it funny. If you've familiar with All the President's Men, you will catch the many parodic references to that film. But the transformation of Liberal heroes Woodward/Redford (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein/Hoffman (Bruce McCulloch) into effeminate twits doesn't work.
Saul Rubinek is given several good lines in his role as the professorial Henry Kissinger. Otherwise, the characters of key Nixon Administration supporting players such as John Dean (Jim Breur), G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer), and Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley) are disappointingly two-dimensional. Sure, they may have been criminals. But they weren't cartoons, and they weren't stupid.
Plot turns can be seen well in advance. We see marijuana leaves sneaked into a cookie recipe by a potheaded brother, and we know that it is only a matter of time until Nixon gets high eating them. Left alone in the Oval Office, Arlen records an improbable declaration of love to Tricky Dick. We immediately know that it will be erased, and become the infamous 'eighteen minute gap'. The cookies, and the scatological implications of 'Deep Throat' and 'Dick', become running jokes that weren't that funny the first time around.
It all ends with Betsy and Arlen making costumes out of a hundred dollar flag, so that they can stand on the roof of a building to waive a double entendre banner at the now disgraced Nixon as he passes overhead in a helicopter. It isn't funny because it doesn't seem credible.
Dick received some sympathetic reviews, but it died at the box office as quickly as the previous comedy starring Kirsten Dunst, Drop Dead Gorgeous. Dunst would soon recover her career with a better retro-1970s film, The Virgin Suicides. (44/100)
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