Variety
"...A devilishly clever satire....This audacious, imaginative political comedy will have Watergate buffs in particular, and baby boomers in general, laughing loud and long..." 8/2-8/1999 p.32-4Rolling Stone
"...A disarmingly clever spoof of the Watergate era..." 08/19/1999 p.127-8 Entertainment Weekly
"...A gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire....[Dunst and Williams] are bubblicious..." -- Rating: A| 09/03/1999 p.46 New York Times
"...An uproariously dizzy satire....Mr. Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature..." 08/04/1999 p.E1 Premiere
"...Pretty inspired....Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams are incredibly winning..." 08/01/1999 p.30 USA Today
"...Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams are amiably confident....Dan Hedaya does one hilarious Tricky Dick..." 08/04/1999 p.10D Los Angeles Times
"...Dunst and Williams are a constant delight..." 08/04/1999 p.C5 Chicago Sun-Times
"...The movie is a bright and sassy comedy....Comedy like this depends on timing, invention and a cheerful cynicism about human nature..." 08/04/1999 p.47 Sight and Sound
"...[A] consistently engaging film..." 10/01/2000 p.65 New York Times 9 of 10
Not to get too solemn about it, but Dick, an uproariously dizzy satire that reduces the Watergate scandal into a goofy Nancy Drew caper for starry-eyed teeny-boppers, would probably not have been made had Monica Lewinsky never slunk into the Oval Office. Who was it who observed that history repeats itself as farce? In this frothy Saturday Night Live-style fantasy of Richard Nixon's downfall, the agents of his destruction are revealed to have been two giggly 15-year-old girls -- baby Monicas, if you will -- who have a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time. Thanks to Dick, at last we know the identity of Deep Throat, the confidential source who gave Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the inside scoop on Nixon's knowledge of the Watergate break-in and involvement in the cover-up. Far from being a high-level government official, the whistle-blowers who met the intrepid Washington Post reporters in an underground parking garage turn out to have been those fearless Monicas, Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams). As Maurice Chevalier so eloquently put it, "Thank heaven for little girls..." Dick, directed by Andrew Fleming and featuring alumni from Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall, has the jovial tone of an extended television sketch. As it rollicks along on a soundtrack of early-1970s hits, it comes up with just enough funny business to keep the movie from losing its fizz. Except for Dan Hedaya's hilariously twitchy Nixon, the physical and vocal resemblances between the actors and famous people they play are, at most, superficial. Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch), in particular, are portrayed as a ludicrous journalistic dog-and-pony show; one is puffed up and stuffy, the other a pudgy, competitive little creep who tries to steal his colleague's information. Pity poor Richard Nixon. Although he's not here to be kicked around by the press anymore, he is still an irresistible lightning rod for gleeful ridicule. In exaggerating Nixon's mannerisms, Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature. With his hunched shoulders, darting paranoid gaze and crocodile grimace, Hedaya's Nixon is the quivering, skulking embodiment of a single word: guilty. - Stephen Holden
San Francisco Examiner 9 of 10
Dick looked like something to run from - an exploitative comedy about two high school girls who get ogled by the men of the Nixon administration. The Clinton parallels seemed obvious, inevitable and ugly... But Andrew Fleming's madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder. Written with Sheryl Longin, Dick is both a ludicrous game whose object is to get its characters to say its title - with feeling - and a raucous saturnalia comprising a bunch of sketches strung together into a story told with the energy of a sleepover and the wobbly-but-lethal aim of phys-ed archery... Together, Dunst and Williams form a two-girl Brady Bunch of pigtails, giggle spasms, Beavis and Butt-head nervous breathing and deceptive sagacity. (Dick inspires the same joy Amy Heckerling's Clueless did in its own distaff pop observations and tiny assassinations.) On her own, Dunst is a sugar-high paddle board teen-aged extroversion on a rubber leash whose mini-thoughts come so fast they create a 10-car pileup in her brain. Williams, though, is the revelation. Watching her drown in a bad haircut and suffer even worse writing on last season's Dawson's Creek, she seemed doomed never to outgrow the show's devolution. But in Dick, she shows an understated, ready-for-anything awareness as a mostly reserved girl whose sexual-romantic awakening is brought to fruition by a president who insists she call him "Dick." Arlene's beach-bound fantasy with Hedaya's Nixon set to the Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Love's Theme" is a supremely absurd and inspired bit of farcical foreplay. Williams, like everyone around her, is funny as hell. - Wesley Morris
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