The seemingly natural sparkle Anne Hathaway brings to her screen performances looks drained out of her for “The Last Thing He Wanted,” an adaptation of Joan Didion’s 1996 novel. This is apt. Hathaway’s journalist character Elena McMahon is an exemplary Didion heroine: a woman worn down to her last nerve.
Directed by Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), who wrote the screenplay with Marco Villalobos, the movie plunges Elena into the 1980s geopolitical turmoil around the United States’s funding of Contras in Nicaragua. Didion’s novel keeps historical details obscured: The book never mentions Ronald Reagan or his secretary of state, George Shultz. They appear here; Schultz, played by Julian Gamble, is practically a supporting character. Elena’s misadventure motivation is personal: Her ailing father (Willem Dafoe) is himself a gun runner, and she imprudently chooses to carry out his last big score.
With its near-telegraphic flashbacks and forwards, and first-person narration by an unnamed journalist writing in 1990s present day, Didion’s novel creates the impression of a slow-motion, backward-running film of a land-mine explosion. Rees jettisons the narrator and irons out the story into a linear structure. While never satisfactorily untangling the source material, she takes other, extreme liberties with it.
The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain. A shot of Hathaway half-standing in a corner of a hotel room, limbs limp, bathed in the ever-so-golden light of sunrise through a window, doesn’t hit home so much as hammer the forehead. And making Ben Affleck’s uber-diplomat character look even more like George Reeves, the original Superman, than Affleck did in 2006’s “Hollywoodland,” in which he played that role, is not exactly subtle. The wolf in pop-culture-iconography sheep’s clothing! What incredible irony!
The Last Thing He Wanted
Rated R for violence, sexuality, language and George Shultz. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
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February 13, 2020 at 07:00PM
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