One of the great showbiz adages came from the febrile mind of quipster playwright George S. Kaufman, who said, “Satire closes on Saturday night.” Kaufman meant that it’s almost impossible to please large audiences by making savage fun of the ideas and people they hold sacred. Kaufman wrote The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers for the Marx Brothers, and both were hits on stage and on screen. But when Groucho and Company turned their attention to politics with the savage and anarchic Duck Soup, the only really great film they ever made, audiences stayed away in droves. Shaken, they turned to the great crowd-pleasing producer Irving Thalberg, who insisted that their next movie feature a treacly pair of ingenues and some gooey love songs.
A Night at the Opera was a smash, and the Marx Brothers never again ventured near satire.
The studio that financed the new political satire called Dick had rueful cause to reflect on Kaufman’s words when the first weekend’s box-office numbers came out. Despite heavy advertising and good reviews, the movie made a disappointing $ 2.2 million and was immediately declared a flop by the Hollywood press.
Those box-office numbers mean that you will have to hurry if you want to see Dick in a theater, because it will be banished from your local multiplex soon. So run, because Dick is an original: a full-scale and inventive political burlesque about Watergate that leaves no one unscathed. Not even Woodward and Bernstein.
The investigative reporters are played with hilariously broad strokes by two expert sketch comedians, Will Ferrell of Saturday Night Live and Bruce McCulloch of The Kids in the Hall. They’re not heroes or saviors of America. Far from it. They are whiny, petulant, and competitive little boys with weird early-1970s hair and a relationship so charged with anger and hurt that it becomes clear writer-director Andrew Fleming is depicting them as a closeted gay couple. The movie opens in the present day, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, with the two reporters getting into a slapping fight on Larry King Live when Bernstein almost reveals the identity of Deep Throat.
It turns out that Deep Throat is not one person, but two teenage girls of extremely limited intelligence who bring down the Nixon administration by accident. In the course of the movie, these two sweet-natured ditzes inadvertently cause the interruption of the Watergate burglary, uncover the payoffs to the burglars, bring about detente with the Soviet Union, ignite a crisis of conscience in John Dean, and feed Woodward and Bernstein the high-level information they need to force Nixon’s resignation.
The Nixon White House we see in Dick is not some ominous, terrifying place but a presidency run by the Key-stone Kops. Most of the performers who play White House staffers are also sketch comics, expert in turning themselves into human cartoons like Harry Shearer, whose G. Gordon Liddy storms around the White House with incriminating documents from the shredding room stuck to his shoe with chewing gum.
Upon learning that the two girls might be able to connect Liddy with the burglary, Nixon himself decides to charm and control them by naming them official White House dog-walkers.
The girls are everywhere, all over the White House. Kissinger gives them a stern lecture on the responsibility of the Johnson administration for the war in Vietnam. They flummox Dean when they ask him why the president needs a lawyer. And when Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, goes off to lunch, they find a tape recorder in her desk.
Nixon soon becomes enthusiastic about the girls’ visits because every time they come to walk his dog, they bring a batch of homemade cookies which, unbeknownst to any of them, are laced with marijuana. During a tense negotiation with Leonid Brezhnev, Nixon insists the Soviet premier try one of the cookies. In a few minutes, Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger are warbling Hello, Dolly! at the top of their lungs together, and thus begins the era of detente.
Nixon is so nice that one of the girls falls in love: scribbling “Mrs. Arlene Nixon” in her notebook at school, and pulling down her pictures of teen idol Bobby Sherman to replace them with covers of U.S. News & World Report.
On the tape recorder on the president’s secretary’s desk, Arlene makes a long recording professing her love — eighteen-and-a-half minutes long, to be precise. They rewind it and hear snippets of Nixon in the Oval Office, featuring a lot of cursing and the sound of the president kicking his dog.
That does it. Arlene falls out of love with Dick. The girls tell Nixon he’s a bad man and a potty mouth, and he throws them out. Later, he discovers Arlene’s recording. “A fifteen-year-old girl,” Nixon mutters. “They’ll crucify me.” And so he erases her eighteen-and-a-half minute declaration of love.
Dick is bright and giddy. Fleming has as much fun with the horrific clothes and fads of the 1970s as he does with the particulars of Watergate. Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst, who play the two girls, are enchanting. They’re holy innocents who cannot be corrupted because they’re just not smart enough to understand what corruption is.
When the girls realize they have forced Nixon’s resignation, one turns to the other and says, with dreamy certainty, “They’ll never lie to us again.”
See this movie.
John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is associate editor and editorial-page editor of the New York Post.
