“Dick”
The better you know the details of Watergate the more you’ll enjoy “Dick,” a wild satire starring Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst as high school girls who live in the Watergate and accidentally lead to the discovery of the Watergate break-in. On a tour of the White House, they recognize someone from the burglary, and so they get hired as “White House dog walkers” to make sure they do not figure out what is going on. Williams and Dunst are adorable and Dan Hedaya and his perpetual five-o’clock shadow make an excellent Nixon. The movie is filled with bright colors, sharp wit, and high energy. Roger Ebert called it a “sly little comic treasure.”
“Secret Honor”
Robert Altman directed this “fictional mediation” on Nixon’s story, with Philip Baker Hall as the tortured ex-President, delivering a monologue filled with anger, bitterness, recrimination, and sorrow. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it “one of the most scathing, lacerating and brilliant movies of 1984.” Ebert also said Hall played Nixon “with such savage intensity, such passion, such venom, such scandal, that we cannot turn away.”
“Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House”
This is the story of the mysterious, anonymous figure who met with Bob Woodward in the shadowy parking garage. Speculation about his identity lasted for decades before Mark Felt revealed that he had been the source guiding Woodward and Bernstein to some of the most significant revelations of the Washington Post’s coverage. Liam Neeson plays Felt, a more complicated figure than the Holbrook version. He never said, “Follow the money.” He leaked to other journalists in addition to Woodward. The true story is murkier and more complex than Goldman’s version. Was it sacrifice and patriotism? Or, was it payback for losing out on the top job at the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover died? Who was Felt protecting, American voters or the Bureau? We know his name now but there is still a lot of mystery left in his story.