# Dick (1999)

### reviewed by
Chad Polenz

Dick Chad'z rating: ** (out of 4 = fair/below average) 1999, PG-13, 94 minutes [1 hour, 34 minutes] [comedy] Starring: Kirsten Dunst (Betsy Jobs), Michelle Williams (Arlene Lorenzo), Dan Hedaya (President Richard `Dick' Nixon), Will Ferrell (Bob Woodward), Bruce McCulloch (Carl Bernstein); written by Andrew Flemming, Sheryl Longin; produced by Gale Anne Hurd; directed by Andrew Flemming.

Seen August 6, 1999 at 4:40 p.m. at Crossgates Cinema 12 (Guilderland, NY), theater #25, by myself for free using my Hoyts season pass. [Theater rating: ***: good picture, sound and seats]

`Dick' is not a film meant for the theaters. It's not that it's super raunchy or in bad taste or the like, it's just a made-for-television movie that somehow got promoted to feature film status. You can practically hear the Hollywood suits glancing over the script thinking `Ooh, this is so funny and witty. Why haven't we done this before?' The truth is everything in `Dick' has, in fact, been done before and a lot better too. The basic premise is a tired idea, but since it's a political satire there's a sense that a witty, zingy, hilarious satire is about to unfold. Unfortunately, the closest the film comes to creative comedy is through a few new `Dick' jokes (and I don't mean the nickname for Richard). Everything else is mostly there to fill in for a minimum running time. Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams star as Betsy and Arlene, two high school students who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Watergate break-in and the elaborate scandal following take place back in the early 1970s. The film is meant as a laugh-out-loud comedy so the basis for the jokes throughout the entire first act and most of the film in general deal with the fact that these girls are too stupid to understand what's really going on. When they find themselves being interrogated by Nixon's goons there's little to laugh at here. It's not a case of the girls thinking they're in big trouble for mailing a letter so close to midnight (which would have been remotely funny), it's a case of them being considered serious threats to national security which goes completely over their head. Playing off characters' idiocy is one thing, but these girls aren't dumb enough to be obnoxiously funny (a la `Dumb & Dumber') and aren't smart enough to see what is so blatantly obvious. To their credit, the contrived screenplay and poor performances by every working actor in Hollywood don't help much either. Dan Hedaya, the king of Hollywood working actors, co-stars as President Richard `Dick' Nixon, one of the most easy-to-make-fun-of figures in modern history and yet there's just nothing that goes `spoof' here. Hedaya's performance tends to flip-flop - first he's nice, likable as a cartoony image of Nixon, but later he's a totally different person - malicious and mean-spirited and disappears for large blocks of time (wouldn't you think the actor playing the title character would get just a bit more screen time?) The story follows Betsy and Arlene and their bimbotic (is that a word?) adventures as they find themselves being flattered by Nixon and have a ball being `official White House dog-walkers,' and `secret youth advisers,' which they proceed to tell everyone about despite Nixon's plead with them to keep it quiet. What a shock that no one believes them. And so the film runs around in circles with Betsy and Arlene continuing to accidentally uncover more dirt on the Watergate scandal without realizing it, while at the same time dealing with even more ridiculous subplots. For example, Arlene finds herself more attracted to Dick than Bobby Sherman, which I suppose could symbolize a more recent case of a young woman being attracted to the president, but just isn't believable at all. Then there's the factual events that are attempted to be explained through the girls' actions, such as their tipping off of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (McCulloch). When the two call the `Commie muck-raking bastards' they think of it as a joke, yet go so far as to reveal the names on a CREEP list (`It must be a list of creeps' they say when they first find the list... stuck to G. Gordon Liddy's shoe!). Later, when they take the `prank' a step further, their pseudonym of `Deep Throat' comes from the porno movie Betsy's brother was caught attending. Much of the film is more of this material - corny, trite, unfunny satire that comes across as a comedy with a identity crisis problem. Is it a straight comedy? Is it an insightful satire? Having the girls' marijuana-laced cookies be the catalyst to many of Nixon's biggest decisions and accomplishments (withdrawing from Vietnam, avoiding a nuclear war with Russia) is a funny idea and sounds like something easy enough to carry out and have more zing than Miracle Whip mayonnaise, but it just doesn't happen. It doesn't even go the route of bawdiness or raunchiness, it's just plain boring (I laughed maybe four times at some slapstick jokes, but the other people in the theater didn't laugh at all). It's easy to pin the blame on the film's co-writer and director Andrew Flemming for botching what should have been a cakewalk film, but that really wouldn't be an honest criticism. Instead, I think everyone is at fault here: the actors for failing miserably at their portrayals (as talented as Dunst and Williams may be, they never seem like high school students nor hippies) and the casting directors for making the film one big sitcom-star-o-rama; the costume, makeup and production crew for making the 1970s look a helluva lot like the 1990s; the music supervisor for using the same old soundtrack songs (it plays more like an homage to `Reservoir Dogs' than a real establishment of the music of the era); the cinematography for making the sheer look of the film drab and static... even the credits feel ripped-off from `Austin Powers' (there's thousands of fonts available, they couldn't find another one to use?)! Maybe there's just nothing left of the Nixon and hippie era worth spoofing.

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