18½

My alphabetical run through Sky Movies is updated by the arrival of another new film with numbers in the title. This one is a . . . Comedy drama, I guess . . . With apparently many references to the Watergate scandal which, I have to admit, I only know the bare minimum about.

Connie (Willa Fitzgerald) is a white house stenographer who accidentally discovers a recording of Nixon (Bruce Campbell) and his aides listening to and discussing the missing 18 1/2 minutes from the Watergate tapes. She meets journalist Paul (John Magaro) and they decide to head to a waterfront motel complex to listen to the tape. Posing as husband and wife, the pair meet some interesting characters at the venue, and are forced to turn to another couple for help, when their reel to reel tape player doesn't work.

I like the pairing of Fitzgerald and Magaro and I thought they had good chemistry together. Whilst they're getting to play really broad characters, I liked Vondie Curtis-Hall and Catherine Curtin as the married couple that the central pair approach too. I also liked that there were a lot of subtler moments in the film, plot hidden in dialogue and there was a genuine surprise at the end that I didn't see coming.

I really didn't like the film though. I think movies can go awry for any number of reasons, budgetary, application, conflict on set. Here though, I feel like this is exactly the movie that Dan Mirvish wants it to be. It is quirky and off beat and they aren't things that I usually dislike, but it didn't feel in service of anything here. There are ideas in the second half of the film that take it too far outside of the realms of reality and that eccentric approach to the story feels forced. Quirk for quirks sake, rather than trying to find an original take.

Happy to read that several reviewers found more in this than I did, but for me it gave me a sword and I stuck it in, I'm not twisting it with relish though.

It's 1974. White House transcriptionist -- someone who takes recordings and converts them into written records -- Willa Fitzgerald has the missing tape recording of Nixon that everyone is hot for. She meets up with reporter John Magaro and they go to a motel in Maryland to listen to the tapes, but his reel-to-reel player is broken. However, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Catherine Curtain at the cabin next to theirs have been listening to a tape of bossa nova non-stop.

It plays more like an extended anecdote than a story, so it's good they have some talent in place that can play it for comedy, like Richard Kind as the one-eyed motel owner, and Alexander Woodbury as a fisherman.

It's certainly an entertaining satire, if not particularly deep. Still, who knew that Bruce Campbell could do such a good Nixon impersonation?

The movie has a fascinating premise: a lowly Washington stenographer in the early 1970s comes across a tape of Richard Nixon and his henchmen listening to the missing 18 and a half minutes from the "Nixon Tapes." Problem is, the filmmaker does all he can to avoid telling the story. The movie is a strange period piece, a vehicle for showing off retro fashions and furnishings. Great attention to detail in those departments, but the story was utterly neglected. The actor playing Richard Nixon doesn't even sound like him.

Writer-director Dan Mirvish perpetrated a 2008 internet hoax by masquerading as Republican strategist "Martin Eisenstadt" during the US presidential elections, hoodwinking actual news agencies before they got wise. Mirvish's latest hoax is "18 1/2," although he and co-writer Daniel Moya do establish a plausible, well-crafted, even clever premise to kick off this cockeyed take on the Watergate scandal that eventually forced the 1974 resignation of Republican President Richard Nixon.

Background briefing: During the 1972 US elections, Nixon political operatives, known as the "plumbers" and funded in part by contributions to his re-election campaign, were caught burgling Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and Office Complex in Washington, DC, in June 1972.

Investigations led by Democratic Senator Sam Ervin revealed Nixon's voice-activated tape-recording system in the White House. Ervin's attempts to subpoena those tape recordings met with resistance, with some of the tapes received having noticeable gaps in the conversations---including one tape, recorded three days after the Watergate burglary, whose gap lasted for eighteen-and-a-half minutes.

The proffered explanation was that Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's personal White House secretary fiercely loyal to him, "accidentally" erased the tape while answering the telephone, an act that required her to perform such implausible physical contortions that the media quickly and derisively dubbed them the "Rose Mary Stretch."

Once former FBI assistant director Mark Felt revealed himself in 2005 to be "Deep Throat," the anonymous Washington insider who advised reporter Bob Woodward during Watergate, the only real mystery left in the Watergate scandal was what could possibly have been erased from that tape with the 18 1/2-minute gap.

Don't count on Mirvish's movie to shed any light on that mystery, but at least he launches it with a feint toward juiciness that dries up all too quickly.

Connie Lashley (Willa Fitzgerald) works as a transcriber at the Office of Management and Budget, typing up recordings of OMB meetings held at the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. The conversations are so bland and mundane that she and co-worker Cheryl (Marija Abney) dub them "the only boring tapes in Washington." But as she begins to transcribe a tape of a very short meeting, she soon hears the voices of none other than Nixon (voiced by Bruce Campbell) and Chief of Staff Alexander Haig (voiced by Ted Raimi) on the OMB tape.

The OMB uses voice-activated recording machines just like Nixon does, and what Connie hears is Nixon and Haig entering the OMB conference room to listen to the tape containing the conversation Nixon had had with his previous chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman (voiced by Jon Cryer), three days after the Watergate burglary, with Nixon and Haig unaware that their recording was itself being recorded. What Connie now has is a recording of those eighteen-and-a-half minutes before they had been erased. Explosive stuff, right?

Connie arranges to meet with New York Times reporter Paul Marrow (John Magaro) to share this scoop with him. Paul wants her to give him the tape, but she refuses, telling him that all OMB tapes are logged, and she must log the tape back in when she returns to work. Her plan is for them both to listen to the tape while he makes his notes. Reluctant to be identified as the source of the leak, Connie tells Paul that while he could win a Pulitzer Prize for this bombshell, she could wind up being indicted.

Unfortunately, after this tidy construction of the setup, buttressed by Fitzgerald's and Magano's quiet urgency captured in Mirvish's tight shots, "18 1/2" careens into mushrooming, haphazard non sequitur similar to a confusing, frustrating dream in which you can never complete your task or reach your destination.

Actually, Mirvish previews that from the start. Traveling to meet Paul in a small town on Chesapeake Bay, Connie's drive begins to seem surreal until you realize that she is arriving in her car that is parked on a ferry. Inside the restaurant, the waitress (Gina Kreiezmar) congratulates her for making him wait for her before she pre-empts his order by telling him she will bring him what Connie has ordered. Already the mood reeks of current indie-prod attitude, with Fitzgerald's clipped, acerbic assertiveness clearly a contemporary affectation, as is Magaro's shlubby passivity.

Needing somewhere to plug in the reel-to-reel tape player he brought with him, Paul suggests a nearby motel run by eyepatch-wearing Jack (Richard Kind). Is one-eyed Jack the wildcard in this budding game of three-card monte about to be played before your eyes? Who can tell? When Connie and Paul discover that his tape player is broken, they try to find another one. This brings them in contact with a group of wannabe revolutionaries hanging out at the shoreline as well as a middle-aged couple, Lena (Catherine Curtin) and Samuel (Vondie Curtis-Hall), who had previously invited Connie and Paul to dinner. Yes, they do have a reel-to-reel, which plays bossa nova constantly, but they'll lend it out only if Connie and Paul have dinner with them first.

This is where "18 1/2" becomes interminable, the part in the dream where you are mired and cannot escape---only now you cannot even wake yourself up because the dinner goes on and on. And on. And on. Yes, there is intrigue because Connie and Paul, having just met, are posing as newlyweds, leading to tense moments as the older couple's questioning begins to probe too uncomfortably.

However, the less said about what transpires after Connie and Paul return to their room to listen to the tape, the better because Mirvish, drained of all inspiration and desperate, resorts to snippets of sex and oodles of violence as the hoary, cliché trope that no one is really who they seem to be gets beaten to death in an eye-rolling finish you would expect from a straight-to-video horror flick.

Suffice to say that whatever secrets Nixon and his cohorts held that required erasure have gone safely to the grave with them because you're never going to find them out from Mirvish's story.

Actually, half-garbled shards of dialog and clearly legible intertitle cards before the closing credits suggest some chicanery involving Howard Hughes, the Nixon campaign and Nixon's close confidante and "fixer" Charles "Bebe" Rebozo, ITT, and Wonder Bread.

Yes, there are foundations for credibility lurking here, such as Hughes's 1957 loan to then-Vice President Nixon's brother Donald in exchange for favorable treatment for Trans World Airlines, in which Hughes owned the controlling interest. Or ITT's 1971 donation to the Republican National Committee in exchange for favorable treatment from Nixon's Justice Department in an antitrust case as well as ITT's involvement in the 1973 right-wing coup d'etat in Chile that the Nixon Administration had orchestrated. And ITT did acquire Continental Baking Company, maker of Wonder Bread, in 1968.

Thus, Mirvish closes with the suggestion of a conspiracy theory that, like so many conspiracy theories, has a ring of truth to it based on circumstantial evidence. But until a conspiracy theory is corroborated, it remains a hoax. Mirvish's "18 1/2" is a hoax, and it could have been a good one, a political-thriller black comedy. The problem is that Mirvish takes far too long to tell his joke, uses too much hand-waving, whisks around his one-eyed Jack wildcard too many times in his endless game of three-card monte designed only to fool you, before he gets to the punchline, which falls flat after all the protracted distractions that preceded it.

Even worse, Dan Mirvish gets the last laugh---at your expense. He has wasted your time making you watch his contrived, convoluted, indulgent narrative that amounts to nothing and tells you even less than that. All he has done is erase 88 minutes from your life. That's a gap you'll never fill again. Stick with 1999's "Dick," starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, which at least has a hilarious explanation for why there needed to be an 18 1/2-minute gap.

The slyest part of "18 1/2" comes if you read the ending cast credits closely when, glimpsed briefly as the two non-speaking revolutionaries, cinematographer Elle Schneider and assistant second director Joshua A. Friedman get into the act. Friedman is billed as "Fred," and Schneider is billed as "Velma." Had the rest of the "Scooby Gang"---Daphne, Scooby-Doo, and Shaggy---been listed, it would have made this "stunt casting" too obvious (though this "Velma" also wears glasses). That's right. Nixon might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.

Now do you believe that "18 1/2" is nothing but a hoax?

REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?

The film has a great premise but it is very poorly executed. The film should be a thriller but it dissappears into weird sub plots which add nothing to the story and rather then draw you in just make you think what the hell has this got to do with anything.

It spins off direction so much that you lose interest in what should have been an interesting subject.

The extra characters are ridiculous left wing stereotypes that are just annoying and wish weren't in the film. It hard to tell whether this was aimed at discrediting left wing politics or if the director actually believes this.

Such a waste of a good idea.