Dick

by Cindy Fuchs

Girls rule. This may be the most significant realization reached by marketers in recent years: Girls buy stuff. Or they get their parents, boyfriends or girlfriends to buy stuff for them. This realization, coming amid chartbusting sales by Buffy and Brandy, Cleopatra and Jennifer Love Hewitt, the WNBA and the Women’s Soccer Team, the Powerpuff Girls and the Spice Girls, has led to some ingenious redefinitions of young femininity. After all, you need to target your audience, shape it to want what you’re willing to sell it.

Voilà. Today’s coolest girl thrives on contradictions and preemptive strikes: She’s adorably aggressive, athletically unthreatening, sweet but not coy, naive but not dumb, vaguely familiar but brilliantly commercial.

It is just such a jumble of contradictions that drives a movie named Dick, in which two smart, charming and wholly self-reliant girly-girls bring down a certain U.S. president who abuses their trust, and by extension, the nation’s. Set in the early 1970s, the film begins when best friends Betsy Jobs (fabulous Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (wonderful Michelle Williams, taking time off from Dawson’s Creek) inadvertently cross paths with G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer in a huge mustache) in a back stairway leading to Arlene’s Watergate apartment, just after the famous 1972 break-in. He sputters and harrumphs, tries to be crafty and authoritative, but the girls react instantly, handling the situation most efficiently: They exchange glances, scream like meemies and run away.

This incident leads, more or less, to a haphazard revision of history, where the girls stumble upon the paper-shredding room during a class field trip to the White House, and soon find themselves hired as official dogwalkers and Secret Youth Advisers by President ("Call me Dick") Nixon (Dan Hedaya), who’s looking to keep tabs on what they know and don’t know. The girls bake cookies for Dick and his staff and tell stories that none of their high school classmates or teachers believe. Arlene even develops a crush on Dick, which means that she takes down all her Bobby Sherman posters and replaces them with news photos of the Nixon.

As the scandal unfolds literally in front of them, Betsy and Arlene realize that Dick’s at least partially responsible — plus, they overhear him cursing at the dog on one of Rosemary Woods’ tape recordings. Hurt and disillusioned, they respond with consummate girl logic, engineering a revenge for Nixon’s personal betrayals that stands in for the unrealized revenge for larger crimes. (OK, Nixon resigned, but his underlings served time; he was pardoned by Ford and then recuperated as some kind of elder statesman, revered at his funeral like he was heroic.) Here, Tricky Dick suffers a righteous humiliation having to do with yet another flamboyant pun on his odious name.

The film rewrites Watergate — the burglary, the cover-up, the press investigation, the resignation — as a series of comic blunders, committed by surrealish renderings of most of the well-known players, including the hyper-competitive and dysfunctional duo Bob Woodward (Butabi brother Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Kid in the Hall Bruce McCulloch), loony Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley), bluster-sexy Kissinger (Saul Rubinek) and fretful John Dean (Jim Breuer), who finds his conscience after a brief but crucial conversation with Arlene and Betsy (he decides he doesn’t want to be "like the rest of them").

Amid all this commotion, Betsy and Arlene maintain their special best-friends-forever equilibrium, determined to do right and have time to go shopping. Betsy lives with her folks and draft-age brother Larry (Devon Gummersall, formerly Brian on My So-Called Life), Arlene with her lonely mom (Teri Garr). At high school, they’re so-so students, with teachers ranging from strict Marian the Librarians with hairbuns and glasses to hippie-dippies in multicolored serapes and afros. They don’t even realize what they’re doing when they call Woodward with information on a certain paper (their treasured White House souvenir) that says "CREEP" on top, listing names and payments: They think they’re ratting out Dick’s bad language. (Meanwhile, he’s riding out the scandal watching Love, American Style and chowing down on ice cream.)

All this messing around with history is not unlike the more optimistic, apparently more respectable play that takes place in Forrest Gump (wherein the honest, sweet, dim-witted white guy conquers football, the war in Vietnam, anti-war protesters, drugs, AIDS, China’s ping-pong team and the computer biz). While Bob Zemeckis’ film was lauded far and wide as a meaningful fable for our times, I’ve already heard one TV commentator complain that Dick might dangerously trivialize the past for viewers who might somehow think it’s "real."

Sadly but unsurprisingly, it might be that such a concern stems from Dick’s interest in "insignificant" circa-’70s girls’ issues (Cocoa Puffs, Olivia Newton-John, crank phone calls, hot pants and dress patterns), as well as the assumption that it will confuse young viewers who, because they weren’t born then, have no grasp of Watergate’s importance. The film’s press kit helpfully observes — in an introduction to a list of comparisons of "facts" and "facts according to Dick" — that Watergate is "America’s greatest political scandal, not just Monica Lewinsky’s home."

The film will likely play to this audience, but it might also work for those viewers who are closer to the age of director and co-writer (with Sheryl Longin) Andrew Fleming (whose The Craft offers some memorable girl-bonding between Robin Tunney and a ferocious Fairuza Balk). He clearly has respect for girls’ mutual rhythms and perceptions: No one in this crazy, too-wound-up-by-half movie is as good hearted, well meaning, cheerfully rambunctious or diehard loyal as Betsy and Arlene.

Fleming claims he’s making a re-revisionist history, to answer the damage done by the more usual revisionism that makes elder statesmen out of crooks. He makes his point with jokes and situations that are silly, amusing, occasionally raunchy, generally clever. For all its appreciation of girly things, Dick is also a smart political movie: It doesn’t even seem contradictory.