Capsule Film Reviews: Dick

I am almost certain that when producer Gale Ann Hurd, writer Sheryl Longin, and writer/director Andrew Fleming pitched Dick, a film about two fifteen years old airheads who are more interested in Bobby Sherman and celebrity culture than politics when the film begins and who inadvertently happen upon and help Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) uncover the secrets of the Watergate scandal, the executives at Columbia TriStar must have thought that the idea for the film was cute. And for a while Dick is cute. It plays cute as Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams) happen upon G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer), one of the Watergate burglars, in the Watergate complex where Arlene lives after they sneak out to mail a letter to Arlene's celebrity crush of the moment Bobby Sherman. It plays cute as Betsy and Arlene are given jobs as official White House dog walkers for a dog named Checkers (one of the film's many history lessons) in order to keep the pair quiet, as Betsy and Arlene feed the White House pot laced cookies, as Betsy and Arlene happen upon documents being shredded and money being readied in a room in the White House in order to keep people quiet about Watergate, and as Betsy and Arlene are promoted to White House Youth Advisors. It plays cute as Betsy and Arlene discover that Nixon (Dan Hedaya) is taping his expletive not so deleted conversations and that he hates Checkers, as Betsy and Arlene accidentally make John Dean (Jim Breuer) go straight, as Betsy and Arlene become Deep Throat--itself an in joke for Betsy and Arlene as Betsy's brother is caught watching the film of the same name at a local DC cinema--and as Betsy and Arlene are chased through the streets of DC by a van with the logo Plumbers of Washington DC across it. The problem, at least for me, was that after about half an hour the ain't we so smart and witty and very obvious Saturday Night Live like cuteness wore really thin. I am giving Dick two stars out of four. It is only slightly better than a typical episode of Saturday Night Live.