Is Everyone Crazy, Deceptive, or Evil?

A pretty woman, bespectacled in tinted, oversize sunglasses, faces her audience from behind the front windshield of a '70s coupe. The silence is broken by political reporting on the car radio: its urgency is about President Nixon, the DNC/Watergate break-in, and the lost 18½ half minutes of a recording of the President and his band of misanthropes.

Source: Bugeater Films via IMDB

If you have seen any of Amazon’s streaming series, Reacher (2022), you will be familiar with Willa Fitzgerald (as Roscoe, the local town cop). She is the actor behind the sunglasses and the driver of the plot of this quite odd movie, which I could not help but watch to the end.

Connie (Willa Fitzgerald) works as a White House “transcriber.” Her quotidian existence is to retrieve confidential, reel-to-reel audio tapes and type them onto paper until her stack is done. One day, one of her tapes is an auto-record from a secure government conference room (not the Oval Office). This tape has in it the 18 ½ minutes of the infamous and missing Nixon tape, instrumental to the Watergate Scandal. The paranoia, plotting, and backbiting in the original tape are embellished by voice-over, mocking yet worried remarks about the implications of the original tape to the Nixon presidency. Color commentary is provided by a verbally incontinent President, Bob Haldeman (Nixon’s first term Chief of Staff), and Former General, Al Haig (who became Chief of Staff after Haldeman’s resignation). We, too, are privy to the fictional (yet utterly plausible) harangue by these men running our country.

Connie realizes that the re-recorded tape she now secrets in her purse stands to alter the course of American history, plus land her a sweet job as a high-ranking White House secretary. Like the job that Rose Mary Woods had until she fell on her sword and admitted to inadvertently erasing part of the 18½-minute tape, by then a household word. We are catapulted into another universe, utterly different from CBS and NBC. That’s when I surrendered to the film, could not stop watching it, and had a clue as to its rave reception (100 percent Rotten Tomatoes and at 20 or more film festivals), and its soon national release.

Don’t expect the skullduggery of the erased 18½ minutes to then become clear, to make sense. It is the plot’s “ticket to ride.” In fact, from here on in the film entered, for me, the genre of a cult movie. Cult for at least two reasons: First, it becomes really hard to follow, or believe, which matters little if you discard logic, and second, the film is populated with a cast of fanciful, buffoonish, and nefarious characters, all clearly directed to over-act their roles.

Nothing from the Nixon administration in 1974 can be dismissed as inadvertent or at all innocent. Why should we think otherwise about the federal government, then and now? Here I thought: Why now? Nothing has changed. Bull rules in the halls of power, ever more politicized. We all are inundated by lies, with social justice a slogan, not a reality.

Regardless of time and space, then and now, we witness in 18 1/2 an idiosyncratic rendition of how evil unfolds in our world. The set is a cheesy, off-season, beach resort, The Silver Sands Motel, with its acromegalic clerk wearing a pirate’s patched eye, Jack (Richard Kind), who adds to the wacky ensemble. Connie and Paul had fled to this forsaken motel to privately play the tape, which he will report on, surely to win a Pulitzer.

The devil never appears in red, with pointed ears and tail. In 18½, it or he could be incarnate in a traveling couple staying at the motel, phonies to be sure, Lena (Catherine Curtain) and Samuel (Vondie Curtis-Hall). The supporting cast must have been asked to act in overdrive; not just Lena (with her ghastly French impersonation) and Samuel (writhing like a Twyla Tharp dancer).

Connie, having launched the plan to disclose the “erased” tape, had arranged a clandestine meeting (at a cheap diner) with Paul (John Magaro), a veteran New York Times reporter chasing the story of his life. Paul appears more together than he is. There are no good guys and gals, just faux ones. To lend a moral message, are is a small group of beach hippies, led by ‘anti-everything’ Barry (Sullivan Jones). He performs tunes, “With one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea. With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.” (Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man).

These hippies are not the ones I knew in the '60s; those took the ethereal and the moralistic to new heights. And, if you met Jack at a motel check-in counter, you would be high-tailing it back to your car, eager to put the place behind you.

18½ is a mind-bending, hammed-up, highly paced, farcical, funny, and suspenseful dark fairy tale. This makes it a timeless curveball aimed to hit the strike zone of our minds. The truth will not set you free.