This surprisingly amusing comedy concerns two fifteen-year-old girls, Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams), who, through an unlikely series of events, become "Deep Throat", the secret source that broke the Watergate scandal. The apparently absurd plot works, thanks to a good script, competent direction (by Andrew Fleming), goofy acting by a slew of Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall comedians, and a totally retro sound and feel that transports those of us who were alive at the time right back into the seventies in all their hippie glory.
The film begins when Arlene, with Betsy in tow, sneaks out of the suite she shares with her mother (seventies icon Teri Garr) at the Watergate Hotel in the middle of the night to mail off her submission to the "Win a Date with Bobby Darin" contest. They run into Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer) in the stairway; he views them with suspicion, but they scream at the tops of their lungs and run away. (Shrieking loudly and in unison gets these giggly girls out of lots of scrapes.) The next day, the girls wander away from their high school tour of the White House and spot a man with TP stuck to his shoe. Thinking to spare him the humiliation of walking around with loo paper trailing behind him, they run after him, but it turns out to be Liddy, and the TP is a list of "creeps" (actually members of the Committee to Re-elect the President with amounts they were paid to cover up Watergate). The girls can't place Liddy, but he remembers them, so he persuades Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley) to question them. The girls end up meeting and charming the presidential pooch Checkers, and through him Nixon (Dan Hedaya), who decides to appoint them as his official dog-walkers and secret youth advisors.
The movie moves at a quick pace, interspersing well-known historical events of the time with hilarious vignettes. A recurring gag involves the girls baking "hello dollies", cookies using walnuts in which Betsy's brother keeps his pot (Betsy: "he says they're walnut leaves"); the Secret Service men can't get enough of these treats, and they cause Leonid Brezhnev to break into song and embrace detente. Arlene falls in love with the president (Arlene wails "I love Dick" to snickers from passers-by) and has a fantasy of him leaving Pat and building her a sandcastle White House.
But when the girls find a tape of Tricky Dicky kicking his dog, they realize they've seriously misjudged him. Their interaction with Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) had started off with a crank call, but when they realize what a bad man Nixon really is, they turn over their evidence (except the "creeps" list, which Betsy's dog ate). When the president resigns and his helicopter flies over their house, they're ready, waving a giant "You suck, Dick!" sign at him.
This movie was much better than I expected it to be. It's silly, yes, but a good laugh, and a fun juxtaposition to something like "All the President's Men", a rather more serious take on the same subject. And it answers the question, "why didn't Bernstein and Woodward reveal who Deep Throat was?" As Woodward says in this movie, "it would just be too embarrassing."