 |
| Images courtesy of MVD Visual |
Indie writer-director and Slamdance Film Festival co-founder
Dan Mirvish is a name you’re probably unfamiliar with despite having worked in
the industry since his 1995 feature film debut Omaha opened the festival
in Park Place, Utah as well as being a key figure in the Martin Eisenstadt hoax
during 2008’s presidential election.
Coinciding with the 2009 book called I Am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man’s
(wildly inappropriate) Adventures with the Last Republicans penned by
Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin, the dynamic duo actively engaged in political satire
including but not limited to generating faux interviews with a nonexistent news
anchor.
Further still, Mirvish and Gorlin created short films snarkily
overpraising Rudolph Giuliani’s presidential campaign. Lastly around 2010, those cats even created
an award called ‘The Harding Prize for Best Crafted Apology’ after president
Warren G. Harding who once said ‘I am not fit for this office and should never
have been there’. Given this director’s
propensity to deal in satirical political theater, it was only a matter of time
before his shenanigans would gradually make their way towards something
resembling the silver screen. Yes, the
lean-mean festival indie trickster, in conjunction with a screenplay co-written
by Daniel Moya, directed his fifth official feature with arguably the most star
power yet: a fictional look at the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal dubbed 18½.
Sporting the unexpected supporting screen talents of such
legends as Troma maestro Lloyd Kaufman, Richard Kind as a one-eyed hotel clerk,
the voices of Ted Raimi as General Al Haig and none other than The Evil Dead
legend Bruce Campbell voicing Richard Nixon, 18½ zeroes in on White
House transcriber Connie (Willa Fitzgerald) who in 1974 accidentally acquires
the infamous missing 18-and-a-half minute gap in the disgraced president’s
Watergate tapes. Pairing up with
reporter Paul (John Magaro from Past Lives), the plucky pair intend on
listening to the tape but discover their reel-to-reel player is broken and they
must navigate the area amid hippies, swingers and unforeseen forces in their
quest to locate another working reel-to-reel machine.
The first and only film to be shot in the Silver Sants Motel
& Cottages in Greenport, New York, 18½ is notable for being one of
the first independent film productions to experience the COVID-19 shutdown and
workarounds with Zoom sessions and audio recordings sent to and from the
director to complete the picture until newly established safety protocols were
in place. Decently acted by the two
leads with Magaro having established himself as a strong supporting star while
Fitzgerald fresh off of both the Scream and The Fall of the House of
Usher television programs, everyone on board is giving this shoestring
production their all. Falling Down fans
should take special notice of Detroit, Michigan native Vondie Curtis-Hall as a
swinger with wife Lena (Stranger Things actress Catherine Curtin) in tow
as neighbors ingratiating themselves on the transcriber-reporter team with
their own secret mission.
Shot handsomely by female cinematographer and director Elle
Schneider, the panoramic 2.35:1 widescreen indie for being on such a clearly
tight budget comes up with some startlingly creative vistas. Take for instance the frequent split-diopter
shots that come up, the kind of things you’d typically see in a Brian De Palma
film. Seeing them here gave the film an
additional finish that made the digital workflow production seemingly more of
its time. The score by Bernard and
Huey composer is mostly fine with some decent supporting tracks playing
over the end credits including but not limited to a few post-credits easter
eggs. Then there’s the disc itself which
comes with a feature length making-of documentary surpassing the length of the
actual feature itself. And if you want
you can see Lloyd Kaufman promoting the film and vinyl soundtrack album in the
extras.
Despite the accolades, track record of its trickster
realistateur, pedigree of the cast and creative cinematography, 18½ unfortunately
never quite gets past the stage of feeling like a dress rehearsal. Not to say the technical and acting merits
aren’t there, they most certainly are.
And the presence of Ted Raimi, Lloyd Kaufman and Bruce Campbell in the
production give the thing an added boost of, albeit, wobbly legs. Cool to see the hoaxter fuse his deceiving
trickery fused with the cinematic narrative in the form of a darkly comic thriller
of historical fiction, but to call 18½ underwhelming would be far too
kind. Not necessarily a bad film, just
kind of a mediocre indie that tries to bite off far more than it can chew. In any event, the disc release is good and
the Raimi-Campbell-Kaufman connection is nifty but please don’t believe the back
of the box informing you this is an ‘Oscar Contender’. In what universe?
--Andrew Kotwicki
