Dick

Two teenage girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) touring the White House in the mid-70s stumble upon some secrets of Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) without realizing what they are, and when things snowball they wind up as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” informant. This is silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot, in part because it provides the perfect antidote to the neo-Stalinist pomposity of Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the glib self-importance of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Andrew Fleming (Threesome, The Craft), who directed from a script he wrote with Sheryl Longin, lacks the polish and pizzazz of Stone or Pakula, but arguably his notions about American politics are healthier and more earthbound than theirs; in his book, Nixon and Kissinger and Woodward and Bernstein are all deserving of ridicule. In some ways this is like Forrest Gump without the neocon trimmings, which for me makes it bracing and energizing, though younger viewers may not catch all the historical references. With Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy, Saul Rubinek as Kissinger, and Teri Garr. Biograph, Evanston, Lake. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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