When one thinks of the great Watergate films, the first names to come up are usually All the President’s Men, Nixon, or even newer entries like The Post or The Martha Mitchell Effect. Somber, high stakes, and decidedly unplayful, these gripping films have defined our idea of a quality Watergate movie for too long. It’s time we turned our attention to the ultimate forgotten Watergate comedy of 1999: Dick. What makes this underrated political satire supremely best, you may ask? Allow me first to set the stage.
We open on a pair of 15-year-old best friends, Betsey (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams), who are staying at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC, penning a love letter to a now-forgotten teen heartthrob. Sneaking out to send the letter, they accidentally stumble upon (and even manufacture) clues that draw attention to the DNC robbery. On a class field trip to the White House the next day, they are unaware of their discoveries. The administration, however, is not. Richard Nixon (Dan Hideya) decides to keep the girls on a short leash by hiring them as official White House dog walkers.
Arlene falls in love with President Nixon, and after they walk in on a document-shredding event, he promotes them to secret youth advisors. They teach him his infamous peace sign, walk Checkers, and Arlene’s passion grows until they hear tapes revealing anti-semitic rants, involvement in the Watergate cover-up, and cruelty toward the dog. The bumbling fools of the Committee to Re-Elect the President results in the girls making all sorts of shocking discoveries. Meanwhile, a prank call to Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) leads the girls to become "Deep Throat" as they decide to take down the presidential crook.
The revisionist stab at Watergate is, in and of itself, a revelation. Before Tarantino allowed an interracial French couple to burn Hitler and his cronies to the ground in Inglourious Basterds, and before The Great rewrote Russia’s history, screenwriters Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin took modern American history for a wild ride. It also lent itself to some pretty memorable quotes: “It’s called incest. And it’s against the law,” Betsey tells Arlene regarding the hypothetical possibility that her future husband could be the son of her estranged father. Or when Nixon tells the girls, “I think your cookies just saved the world from nuclear catastrophe,” after their special batch of Hello Dollies causes Leonid Brezhnev and the Nixon administration to start singing show tunes together. And, naturally, there are plenty of phallic double entendres to be found.
The low-stakes relatability of the revision is also a draw. Arlene and Betsey are average teenage girls to the extreme. They bake, ride the school bus, go shopping. The secret face of Deep Throat revealed to be these two average, good-hearted teenage girls is a most welcome palate cleanse. “How dare they keep treating us like stupid teenage girls?” Arlene asks at one point. “We are stupid teenage girls,” Betsey casually replies. The film doesn’t pretend to give us protagonists who undergo massive changes in intellect and core character traits. Rather, the audience is treated to best friends who never pretend to be something they’re not.
On top of excellence in writing, Dick features an astounding number of A-List and quality B-List actors within its hour-and-a-half runtime. We see Kirsten Dunst at the height of her indie-queen mania, Michelle Williams before she established herself as a world-class actress, Will Ferrell at his spazzy best, Dan Hideya in all the buffoonery and agitation of Nixon, and small but strong appearances by a young Ryan Reynolds and Saturday Night Live’s Ana Gasteyer. Indeed, there are a plethora of reasons to adore Dick. The costumes could make even the most lukewarm of vintage-lovers weep: Williams and Dunst get a costume change in just about every scene, clad in technicolor polyester, a teenybopper triumph in every frame. And the soundtrack is filled with groovy ‘70s jams that can’t help but make one think Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 is a little guilty of plagiarism: think hits by the Jackson 5, Redbone, Carly Simon, Blue Swede.
But above all the other reasons, the main secret to Dick’s success is its absurdity. To the average American, the improbability of the Nixon saga is hard to believe as is. The most powerful man in the world was so paranoid that he had to sanction a robbery of the Democratic National Convention? That his own team name (Committee to Re-Elect the President) would spell out CREEP? The anonymous source that took down the president went by the name Deep Throat? You can’t write that stuff. As so often happens (lately, more and more it seems), the reality of the American political system, of the Watergate scandal, and of the Nixon administration was and is stranger than the fiction of films like All the Presidents Men and Frost/Nixon. Not so with Dick.
More than once, the girls’ reaction to a sticky situation is to scream and run away. Even this is a more relatable action than those of the conspirators and thieves. The silly plot devices of pot-laced cookies causing Nixon’s paranoia and a 15-year-old’s crush on the president (she sings him Olivia Newton John’s “I Honestly Love You” on his recording device) lead to the erasure of the Watergate tapes. The girls’ kindness to a dog resulting in the take-down of the leader of the free world - this level of wacky reimagining is the only thing strange enough to rivalry reality, and, indeed, to cushion the blow of reality. And isn’t that what a good comedy, maybe even a good film, is supposed to do? To distract us, allow us an escape from the truth while simultaneously illustrating a truth? In this way, Dick is biblical: it may not be historically accurate, but it does make you think.
At the film’s end, Arlene and Betsey watch the TV screens in a department store wistfully as Richard Nixon resigns. “It’s gonna be different now,” Arlene says. “They’ll never lie to us again,” Betsey piggybacks. While we laugh because we have 50 years of context that proves quite the contrary, as the girls roller skate around the oval office to “Dancing Queen” and the credits roll, we can’t help but think: Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?