Movie Review: The Last Thing He Wanted

The Last Thing He Wanted * ½ / *****

Directed by: Dee Rees.

Written by: Dee Rees and Marco Villalobos based on the novel by Joan Didion.

Starring: Anne Hathaway (Elena McMahon), Ben Affleck (Treat Morrison), Rosie Perez (Alma Guerrero), Edi Gathegi (Jones), Mel Rodriguez (Barry Sedlow), Toby Jones (Paul Schuster), Willem Dafoe (Richard McMahon), Carlos Leal (Max Epperson), Julian Gamble (Secretary George Schultz).

 

Dee Rees is an incredibly talented director – her first two features – Pariah and Mudbound – are both excellent, both personal, although Mudbound has a more epic scope than Pariah did. Her films are expertly crafted – they look amazing – and generally she gets great performances out of her casts. I preface this review of her latest film – The Last Thing He Wanted – by saying all of this, because Rees latest film is pretty much a disaster. It is the most poorly plotted film in recent memory – a film that gets increasingly confusing as it moves along, before ending with a horrible final scene, and laughable final shot. Rees is still an immensely talented filmmaker – but The Last Thing He Wanted is a terrible movie.

 

The film stars Anne Hathaway as Elena McMahon, a reporter for a fictional, Washington based paper. It’s the early 1980s, and she is doing important work in Nicaragua, before she is quite literally chased out of the country. She is working on a story of the Contras, and their relationship with Reagan, etc. – but her bosses don’t want that story – they want her covering the upcoming election. Then, through a series of strange coincidences, she finds a personal connection to the contras and that story through her father – Richard (Willem Dafoe). He’s running some guns down to South America – of course – but he’s also very ill. He cannot make the necessary trips – so Elena ends up going in his place. This is essentially the setup for the film – and it takes half its runtime to get there. Once that trip begins though, and Elena heads down to South America, the entire film flies off the rails.

 

I will say this – Hathaway is acting her ass off in this film – trying her best to find a consistent character to play, and never quite finding it. Not that it’s her fault – the movie tries to give her several relatable humanizing elements – a divorce, a daughter she loves, but is distant from, breast cancer survivor, the recent death of her mother, her complicated relationship with her father, etc. – but none of them really work (seriously, the daughter, the cancer and the dead mother are basically afterthoughts). None of it really explains the central question that the movie fails to answer – why the hell she agreed to go to South America and essentially become an arms dealer for her father. The film never really answers this question – and so the whole movie has this question hanging over its head.

 

Still, the film could have worked except for the fact that the entire second half of it makes absolutely no sense and is essentially a series of one confusing scene after another. We are introduced to character after character – Ben Affleck’s emotionless CIA agent, who becomes a love interest of sorts of Elena, an arms dealer named Jones (Edi Gathegi), whose motivations seemingly change minute to minute, and worst of all an ex-pat who owns a hotel (Toby Jones) who waxes poetic endlessly about nothing – who Elena ends up working for getting newspapers and cleaning up (why – I HAVE NO IDEA).

 

The Last Thing He Wanted ends up being that rare film that somehow manages to be confusing beginning to end, and also almost all endless exposition. When characters are constantly explaining things to you, you would think it would impossible for it to be this confusing. You’d be wrong.

 

The film is based on a novel by the great Joan Didion. I haven’t read this novel, but Didion is a genius writer – but perhaps not one destined to be adapted for the screen. Perhaps the dialogue doesn’t come across as tin eared on the page as it does in these actors’ mouths. Perhaps she finds a way to make this convoluted series of plot twists and turns – and character twists and turns – not seem so arbitrary and confusing. Perhaps she makes you care about something. The movie does none of those things. Yes, Hathaway does what she can here – as does Dafoe (although, it’s the stereotypical Dafoe role) and some others (I always liked Rosie Perez, was disappointed when she disappeared from Hollywood, and am heartened that she’s back – but she’s given nothing to do here). The film also looks beautiful, as it hops from one tropical locale to the next. And yet, it’s a complete and total mess – almost as if the original cut of the movie was about 4 hours, and they just random cut half of it, and hoped you could follow along. Good luck with that.