Mark Reviews Movies: 18½

18½, Adventure Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 26, 2022

Only a handful of people, if that, ever knew what was said between Richard Nixon and his H.R. Halderman during that infamously absent 18 minutes of tape recording. Only three days after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, the then-President and his then-Chief of Staff had something to say.

While the official story is that Nixon's secretary did some awkward stretching that accidentally erased that section of the tape, we're all thinking adults here. Despite his protests, Nixon either was a crook or intentionally surrounded himself with crooks. Screenwriter Daniel Moya takes that rational guess to its logical end in 18½, a piece of speculative history that uses a recovered copy of that audio gap as a jumping-off point for a comedic thriller. The setup is ingenious, but in execution, director Dan Mirvish's movie isn't quite irrational enough to work as a comedy and is also a bit too illogical to function as a thriller.

That premise, though, is and remains quite tantalizing for a while. It follows Connie (Willa Fitzgerald, who, with her quick-witted attitude and underlying sincerity, is quite good here), a transcriber working for the White House in the early part of 1974. She has arranged a clandestine meeting with Paul Marrow (John Magaro), a journalist who has been looking into the Watergate scandal but is always a step behind the competition.

At a cozy diner in a small Maryland town, Connie explains that, during the course of transcribing a seemingly routine and mundane meeting, she heard a recording of Nixon and his new Chief of Staff Alexander Haig discussing the missing section of tape. That's just before the two men actually start listening to the original audio, trying to decide how damning it is and what should be done with it.

This, of course, would be one of the biggest scoops in American political history, and the rest of the story has Connie and Paul attempting to find a way to listen to the full tape and figure out what to do with the information. The plot features a good amount of running around, since Connie, who has a perfect memory of what she hears, has yet to listen to the tape (She called him as soon as she determined what she had and, because she listens to tapes all day for work, doesn't have a reel-to-reel player at home) and Paul needs an electrical outlet to use the player he has in his trunk.

All of this plays a bit like a comedy of errors, with the two adopting aliases as a newly married couple on their honeymoon, checking into a cottage at a local hotel, meeting an eclectic collection of folks along the way, and facing assorted obstacles to just listen to about 20 minutes of audio. A couple of those eccentrics include Jack (Richard Kind), the helpful proprietor of the hotel who happily jokes about needing an eye patch, and Barry (Sullivan Jones), the leader of a post-hippie group of radicals with a narrow focus against a particular brand of sliced bread.

Some of this hints and pokes at the political and cultural divide at the time, although everyone, even the hippies, seem sick and tired of the constant stream of reports and speculation about Watergate. Some still like Nixon (even Connie voted for him twice, on account of his stated policy regarding the Vietnam War), and others see it as a never-ending distraction when there are larger things at stake.

Just as with the cleverness of the basic premise, Moya smartly incorporates this underlying debate and skepticism about Nixon, his apparent corruption, and the government in general into the story, without losing a sense of urgency about the matter at hand. Meanwhile, Mirvish provides a bit of paranoia, using long takes and wide shots to reflect the feeling that, even if nobody is watching these two, someone always could be (A mysterious man in a boat seems to be staring into the cottage window with binoculars, for example).

All of these meticulous details and this narrative momentum collapse, though, with a single, extended scene. In it, Connie and Paul, now desperate to find a reel-to-reel player, accept an invitation to dinner from their hotel neighbors Samuel (Vondie Curtis Hall) and Lena (Catherine Curtin). While the sequence incorporates both suspense and humor with how easily and often our protagonists' cover story could fall apart, Samuel and Lena (despite how charming Curtis Hall is and how amusingly ridiculous Curtin's Paris-by-way-of-all-of-Europe dialect may be) never feel as if they fit into the movie's political or cultural schematic. In emphasizing the comedy of Connie and Paul being forced into increasingly awkward positions, the story loses its momentum as a thriller and its bite in terms of the contemporary political landscape.

The movie's climax does somewhat work. After the previous delay, though, the filmmakers do rush to and through it, with a lot of hasty exposition, explaining uncertain or questionable motives, in the middle of other action—including the chance to hear what conspiratorial extremes Moya goes to in imagining the contents of the recording (The voices dramatizing the speculation come from Jon Cryer as Halderman, Ted Raimi as Haig, and Bruce Campbell as Nixon). By that point, 18½ has lost too much of its early energy to fully recover.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products