18 1/2 (2021)
The Long and Rewinding Road
Movies with an inconsistent tone are a pet peeve of mine.
There are always exceptions.
By the end of Dan Mirvish’s brilliant 18 1/2, I realized that the film’s narrative/emotional instability was (intentionally or not) a meta-thesis that demanded I rewatch it with a wiser set of eyes. My packed schedule will keep me from doing so for quite awhile, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the movie, and imagining what I might discover when I get around to it.
Set in 1974, Mirvish and co-writer Daniel Moya’s story begins with Connie (Willa Fitzgerald), a White House transcriber whose ambitions seem as distant as the miles of reel-to-reel audio she types up every day. One such tape turns out to be a secret conference room recording containing the mythical eighteen-and-a-half minutes that were erased from a conversation between disgraced former President Richard Nixon, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and General Al Haig.
Connie arranges to meet reporter Paul Marrow (John Magaro) at a diner, where the two discuss what to do with the evidence. Paul wants to bring it back with him; Connie doesn’t want to let the tape out of her sight. They compromise by taking a trip up the road to a seaside motel, where Paul can take notes while using his personal player in the privacy of an out-of-the-way cabin.
Because this is a movie, nothing works out as planned. Between the nosy and talkative desk clerk (Richard Kind), the bomb-making revolutionaries a few doors down (led by the magnetic Sullivan Jones, whose character should have a Netflix series), and the eccentric elderly couple (Catherine Curtin and Vondie Curtis-Hall) who insist on having dinner with the skittish Connie and Paul (whom they believe to be newlyweds), 18 1/2 gradually shifts from a sly, All The President’s Men-adjacent thriller to a wacky-neighbor sitcom with political undertones.
It’s a head-scratching change, but if you’re on board with the bickering-strangers-pretending-to-be-married trope or Curtin’s boozy, French-accented diatribe about corrupt institutions (a not-at-all subtle jab at the Trump administration, whose parallels to Nixon inspired the movie), then the middle portion of the film should play just fine. I was bewildered and frustrated during this stretch, but the actors were so engaged with the material that I soon found myself forgetting about the conspiracy stuff and enjoying Mirvish and Moya’s gonzo prime-time nonsense.
Cue another switch-up, which finds Connie and Paul back in their cabin, at long last ready to listen to the infamous (and eponymous) missing minutes. Mirvish films largely from the outside looking in, evoking the hovering, stalking malevolence from the opening moments of John Carpenter’s ‘78 Halloween.
The good times go bye-bye as the filmmakers erect a three-tiered tension stack: What’s on that tape? Who’s watching Connie and Paul? Has the young pseudo couple’s initial distrust and paranoia subsided after their crazy day together—or will it re-emerge stronger, spurred on by too much drink and too many lies?
Picking up that Halloween thread, there’s an additional slasher-movie element to this climactic scene. It has often been argued that late-70s and early-80s horror movies were blood-soaked morality plays, which handed down death sentences to anyone taking drugs or engaging in premarital sex. A more nuanced view removes Puritanism from the equation, while also acknowledging the danger of these vices: it’s not the fact of the act, but the distraction in the face of imminent danger that exposes people to extremely determined predators.
I’ll tiptoe around spoilers here, but something happens during Paul and Connie’s listening party that definitely qualifies as a distraction. And as they come face to face with the consequences, Mirvish deftly amps up the energy with a confrontation that accomplishes another storytelling hat trick: We get some surprising answers to long-standing questions; we get a few more questions to consider (which will eventually be resolved in another series of delicious reveals at the very end); we are treated to a fight scene whose framing and style plays like the poolside mobster murder in Goodfellas as directed with the black-hearted mania of the showdown in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense, Mirvish and Moya close out their film with surprises that invited me to reevaluate absolutely everything—including what I’d mistakenly considered out-of-place comedy and characters whom I was sure had more to do with a plot to get that tape than they actually did. Unlike those mainstream hits that I mentioned, the 18 1/2 crew leave the rewinding to us—no montages overlaid with creepy music spelling out what we’d missed or misinterpreted. Aside from one character remembering a key piece of dialogue that they hadn’t paid attention to, the filmmakers leave it up to us to retrace the film’s steps, scrap our pages of previous mental notes, and start again with a fresh and open mind.
My one critique, and it’s an odd one that I’d rather not have to make, is that Willa Fitzgerald’s performance—while very good—doesn’t belong in this movie. Everything about 18 1/2 feels authentic to the time period, from the costuming to the locations to Elle Schneider’s hazy, nostalgic cinematography. And the other performers imbue their characters with the underlying tension of their 1970s political-thriller forebearers.
But Fitzgerald feels positively modern in her portrayal of Connie. This could come down to a combination of script, direction, and acting choices. Whatever the reason, the performance is laced with the 21st-century sensibility that suggests being a “strong female character” necessitates sullen, stone-faced seriousness at all times and abrasiveness in just about every interaction with men. It doesn’t make sense that Connie would approach the reporter whom she’d reached out to for help by constantly dressing him down during their first encounter. Even the waitress, on seating a late-to-the-rendezvous Connie, makes a crack that “It’s nice to see the man waiting for once”.
I don’t doubt Mirvish and Moya had anything but good intentions when writing Connie, but in making her so off-putting, and by setting up a few well-placed contrivances (her boss, played by Troma founder Lloyd Kauffman, is, of course, a sexist jerk), the filmmakers fall into the trap of seemingly trying (and failing) to fix the historical record by making it far less “problematic”. Frankly, for large stretches of the film, Connie feels like a female character written by men who think that the apex form of women is the asshole version of men. I’m not suggesting that Connie shoud have been some damsel afraid of her typewriter’s shadow, but it’s weird to see Paul as the slumped-over nervous wreck in that first scene, considering Connie was the one holding something that could very well get her killed. Fitzgerald plays half the movie as if she’s auditioning for Faye Dunaway’s role in a remake of Network (a role, incidentally, that was more recognizably human).
Fortunately, Connie comes to life later in the story, partially due to the influence of alcohol, and partially due to things I wouldn’t dare spoil here. In the end, I found myself wrapped up in her character and very curious to see how my perception of her might change the next time around.
For all this rambling, I haven’t actually mentioned what’s on the tape—or, more precisely, who’s on it. Though we never see them on screen, Bruce Campbell, Jon Cryer, and Ted Raimi bring Nixon, Haldeman, and Haig, respectively, to such life that there might as well be a picture-in-picture display of their scene. For his part, Campbell doesn’t “do” Nixon; he delivers a bona fide performance that makes him feel like a man instead of a caricature (though, thanks to speculative embellishments from the writers, there are plenty of opportunities to rib ol’ Tricky Dick). I’m still tiptoeing around spoilers here, but I will say that a fun special feature for the 18 1/2 Blu-ray would be an audio track of the full exchange, minus the ambient commotion of the scene in which it was played.
18 1/2 is a rousing bit of speculative historical fiction marked by imagination, intrigue, and an eye for conspiratorial layers that, like Watergate’s twisted legacy, may never be fully unraveled.
Want to know more about the making of 18 1/2? Watch Ian and Sujewa Ekanayake’s interview with Dan Mirvish on the latest episode of “IndieSeen”!
