18 1/2 (2024)

18 1/2

Take “18 1/2”, for instance, to a pitch meeting at a studio filled with green lighters, and the first question you’ll hear is: “Who’s going to see this thing?” The answer, one might conclude from seeing the film itself, is the filmmakers and anyone else who happens to like it. Many such fantastic little films have been made on the outer fringes of that system. This version of what happened to Richard Nixon’s infamous secret tape gap is another; which isn’t to say it’s surefire or anything but would likely not go down well at all. What makes it special is there seems no rhyme or rhythm when making choices or time for making them.

This slight and quirky movie set during Watergate was directed by veteran indie filmmaker Dan Mirvish (“Bernard and Huey”) and written by Daniel Moya, based on a story they both composed. It runs just under 90 minutes and moves in and out of several genres without adhering strictly to any one. Though it never develops into a romance per se, the picture always threatens as if it could become one; neither does it offer political satire nor conspiracies even though some parts resemble those genres (all throughout the movie you can see close ups of recording devices as well as people being reviewed form outside surveillance).

Only that which keeps coming back after you’ve turned off your screen. Every choice is made with confidence yet from an intuitive place like decisions made by someone dreaming while awake.

Connie (Willa Fitzgerald), a transcriber who stumbles upon an audio recording of Nixon (Bruce Campbell), H.L. Haldeman (Jon Cryer) and Alexander Haig (Ted Raimi) listening back over part of their tapes before deciding subsequently what portions should be struck out. Apparently they failed to realize that they were holding this private listening party in a room where every word spoken therein gets recorded automatically, and in this way Connie ended up listening to the discussion that she now wants to pass on to Paul (John Magaro) a journalist from New York Times.

Paul is weary of the Washington Post’s reporting on Watergate. He wants his own scoop. He desires to listen to the tape himself. Connie will not allow it out of her hands, and rightly so. They decide to go to a Silver Springs Motel near them where they check into a room as if they are married people and play the recording so that Paul can write down what he hears.

They end up pretending to be newlyweds and accepting a dinner invitation from an alarmingly forthright married couple, Samuel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and Lena (Catherine Curtin), who are staying in another room at the motel and, as luck would have it, own a reel-to-reel player upon which they’ve been replaying the same bossa nova album for years.

Samuel and Lena epitomize the film’s offbeat vibe. The moment you see them on screen, all sorts of bells start ringing but it’s hard to figure out exactly why they make your spidey sense tingle other than their boisterousness and eccentricity. Veteran character actors Curtis Hall and Curtin get parts here that reveal aspects of their talent we have never known about before.

Samuel is a WWII vet with plaid ascot tied around his neck; suddenly he starts writhing sensually with no reason, whirling arms hips around by himself without any moves by others accompanying him on screen or anything else triggering this kind of behavior. Lena is French with nonstop talking. Her solos are absolute gibberish bordering on beat poetry-like language use

They met in France, which at that time was occupied. “What did you do during the war?” Connie says to Samuel across the table. “We carried out a successful operation,” he responded. This is a stinging sentence because though not a real reply, Samuel speaks with it matter of factly but also with an element of provocation.

She does not merely open the door when Lena leads Connie and Paul in their suite; instead she throws it open strangely as if for no reason as everything else she does. (When she launches into a long riff during dinner, the movie jump-cuts between different takes of the actress performing the scene; there’s one brief shot where Curtin is speaking into a baguette as if it’s a microphone.)

Another ace supporting player, Richard Kind, has a subtler yet somehow equally unsettling role as the motel owner who is always talking too much. However, delivering this particular message to Connie and Paul’s front door, he apologized for his handwriting: “I have slight tremor in my hand since I was kid—mercury poisoning. I used to suck on thermometer.”

What reason? What are Samuel and Lena up to? What about these two? Do they have an understanding? Why all these unlikable characters? Are they only some freaks around here? Is this some kind of comedy or something? To some extent perhaps, especially when we are listening to tapes from Watergate tape and participants chatter such lines like “dam Howard Hughes damn him and his sandwiches!” But then it’ll get menacingly sad but still won’t completely commit itself to saying anything profound or deep down serious about things, leaving us with confusion over what it began as and what became of a moment when it reverts back to being silly once again.

Founder of Slamdance Film Festival Mirvish learned from renowned director Altman Founder of Slamdance film festival Mirvish was mentored by altman’s influential director. It’s his best-directed film and also most Altman-like, with its creamy lighting overlapping dialogue and long takes as well as fluid, sometimes arbitrary seeming zoom-ins to actors and zoom outs too.

Dana Altman, Mirvish’s production partner and longtime cinematographer/cameraman is Robert Altman’s grandson. At age fifteen he had first credit as a camera assistant on “Nashville”. Some of the compositions evoke that film as well as Altman’s Brewster McCloud and The Long Goodbye.

But for the most part, the movie has the feeling of one of those small indie films usually but not always based on a play that Altman did in the 1980s, after he’d had a string of flops and couldn’t get studio funding anymore and decided to have fun messing with his signature style, in features such as Streamers or Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, or Secret Honor (about Richard Nixon on the eve of resignation) or even HBO series Tanner ‘88.”

All this background history and parallelism is admittedly interesting only to die-hard cinephiles; however so too is the film which happens to be a private art-house joke unto itself. What else does it want besides doing what it feels like? Who knows?

Nevertheless, those who say that are meaningless will eat their words at some point in the future; just as some people dismissed Altman’s so-called minor 1980s films until they thought about what it actually was instead of what they saw. “Everyone is watching A when B is taking place right under their noses,” one character says. “And no one notices.”

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