18½ : Fun With Watergate

There are movies that draw you in, and there are movies that draw you in so much you forget the world around you. 18½ is so riveting and immersive that I forgot I was making a cup of tea and found a cup of cold, over-steeped leaf water after the final credits rolled.

The iconic opening shot is of Connie Lashley (Willa Fitzgerald) in her car, listening to an announcer on the radio talk about how theories are continuing around the missing 18½ minutes on the Watergate tape. The world around Connie pans in an impossible direction behind her and Luis Guerra’s music swells in the background, enveloping us in the world of a 1970’s political thriller.

18½'s intricate plot is set up in the opening scene between Connie and Paul Marrow (John Magaro, an established reporter she’s asked to meet her. The paranoiac web of taped conference rooms maintained by the Nixon Administration has created a copy of the missing 18½ minutes that hard-working Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transcriptionist Connie has in her possession. Connie’s tape not only includes Nixon (Bruce Campbell) telling his Chief of Staff General Al Haig (Ted Raimi) that the tape of his June 20th 1972 discussion about the Watergate break-in with his prior chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman (Jon Cryer) needed to be…