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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
One of the first shots, a close-up of a typewriter waiting to strike blank paper, is lifted from the extreme close-up of the teletype that opens Pakula's movie -- only here, what's being written is Arlene's entry in Tiger Beat's "Win a Date with Bobby Sherman" contest. Sneaking out of Arlene's Watergate apartment at midnight to post the letter, the two run right into the break-in. (They overhear the codename "Operation Gemstone" and think they've happened upon a jewel heist.) During a White House field trip the next day, they're recognized by G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer, as usual a bit too pleased with himself) who has Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley) drag them in for questioning ("When you think of the president, do you think [dramatic pause] friendly thoughts?"). Suspicious of what they might know, the president himself (Dan Hedaya) gives them the title of Official White House Dog Walkers and later Secret Youth Advisers to the President.
The movie's conceit is that Betsy and Arlene's access to the White House puts them in possession of all sorts of information. The gag is they don't realize it. When they stumble upon a room where agents in suits are shredding documents, Nixon (who has instructed them to call him Dick), explains it's for his papier-mâché hobby. When they find a list of names and amounts of money headed "CREEP List," Arlene says, "I guess all the people on that list are creeps."
Even when they put two and two together and decide to pass on the information to the Post reporters that Dick has referred to as "those radical muckraking bastards Woodward and Bernstein," they're more motivated by the nasty things they've overheard Dick saying about his dog, King Timahoe (whom he insists on calling Checkers), than by his comments about Jews and coverups.
The movie's daring lies in how offhand it is. Fleming and Longin treat Watergate in the same way that John Waters treated racial integration in "Hairspray," as the stuff of teen-problem movies. And they go the joke even better by making Betsy and Arlene no sillier or more childish than anyone else in Washington. The movie has a parade of gifted second bananas: Ana Gasteyer as Rosemary Woods, Saul Rubinek as a Katzenjammer version of Henry Kissinger, and Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch (flipping his Dustin Hoffman wig hilariously) as Woodward and Bernstein. Their scenes recast the pair as the journalistic hotshots they were waiting to become. The movie's prologue has them appearing on Larry King with undisguised contempt for each other and all the little fish whose pond they no longer inhabit. Asked to reveal the identity of Deep Throat, McCulloch smugly says, "I don't think we'd reveal it on a little tiny show like this."
Above all it has Dan Hedaya's Dick. Next to Philip Baker Hall's possessed impersonation of Nixon in Robert Altman's scurrilous and brilliant "Secret Honor," no performance has made it seem more possible to even consider feeling sympathy for Nixon. Hedaya plays Dick less as a schemer than as the craven social outcast he was. There's a sequence that cuts from Betsy and Arlene hanging out with nothing to do on a Friday night to Nixon, alone in the West Wing, eating a bowl of ice cream while he waits for "Love, American Style" to come on. Hedaya -- his lower lip outthrust, his jowls ready to waggle at any moment, his eyebrows threatening to levitate inches above his head -- keeps Nixon's beady eyes continually ready to pop. He's a great comic presence. Watching him try to "rap" with Betsy and Arlene is like watching a man with a clubfoot trying to do the twist.
Dick doesn't escape squaresville; Betsy and Arlene do. Throughout the movie, the girls move further and further away from their good-dooby nerd personas. They take to wearing bell-bottoms, ponchos and headbands, sticking a tentative toe in uncharted realms of (for them) hipness. In the movie's climax, on the day Nixon leaves the White House, the girls prepare a going-away message for Dick and, to deliver it, deck themselves out in halters and hip-huggers they've made out of an American flag. That scene holds the key to the thrill "Dick" offers, the thrill of hearing something forbidden being said aloud, something that no other account of Watergate has dared to acknowledge: the sheer exhilaration of it.
In the midst of Watergate, the Boston columnist George Frazier, an unreconstructed Nixon hater, nonetheless wrote a piece in which he said that you'd have to be wholly cynical to hope that Nixon was guilty. In Frazier's view, the possibility that our President would turn out to be just as bad as we imagined became the same as wishing tragedy on the nation.
But Watergate wasn't a tragedy. To qualify, there would have to have been someone at the center of it whose ascent and fall amounted to more than, as Norman Mailer so memorably put it, "the apocalyptic hour of Uriah Heep." Nixon, the most consistent of men, a man who found in Watergate the apotheosis of all he stood for, was not that man.
All the cynicism that followed his resignation and continues in politics to this day, all the talk of "post-Watergate morality," all of the unfortunate legacy of Woodward and Bernstein -- the media's inability to distinguish everyday, ordinary corruption from true corruption -- does nothing to diminish the fact that Nixon's fall was a triumph of the Republic, a triumph in which we were all allowed a role to play. It felt great when the bastard left. And if Betsy's comment on hearing about Dick's resignation, "They'll never lie to us again," is naive, it at least reflects the joy we felt at the time. At that moment, they didn't get away with lying to us.
The sunniness and high spirits of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams's performances are less a reductio ad absurdum of the justifiable national pride we felt in bringing down Nixon than a pure distillation of the giddy joy of it. Like those people Mary McCarthy wrote about -- who felt perhaps more alive than ever as they followed the story, because suddenly they had a stake in the future of the country -- Betsy and Arlene discover the joy of being caught up in something bigger than themselves.
When Nixon departs the White House in "Dick" he does so to the accompaniment of a pop song, language that the girls can understand: Carly Simon's "You're So Vain." The fall of a president is joined to the joy of turning on the radio and hearing the perfect song at the perfect moment. The movie's freest, most exhilarating moment follows in the sequence that accompanies the end credits: Betsy and Arlene roller-discoing around a newly empty Oval Office to the tune of Abba's great "Dancing Queen." The party can begin. It's got to be real.
