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There has to be an explanation for what went wrong here. How does a project, co-written and directed by Dee Rees, her follow up to the Academy Award nominated Mudbound, fall so far off the rails? Rees not only once again had the supporting of Netflix, but was adapting the Joan Didian novel The Last Thing He Wanted. Somehow, despite the considerable talents of Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Anne Hathaway, the movie of the same name is an utter disaster. One of 2020’s worst so far, it seems destined to end the year in a position of dishonor. It boggles the mind how wrong this all went. The film is drama mixing conspiracy thriller, crime, and mystery elements. Taking place in the mid 1980s, we follow journalist Elena McMahon (Hathaway) as she investigates what will eventually become the Iran Contra controversy. Along with a fellow veteran D.C. journalist...

In a telling example of how bad things can happen to creative people, the prosecution presents The Last Thing He Wanted. How does a director as stellar as Dee Rees (Mudbound, Pariah) go so thunderously wrong adapting a 1996 novel by the great Joan Didion, with a cast headed by Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Dafoe? Here’s Exhibit A.

Incoherence courses through this Netflix Original, a 1980s-set political thriller that Rees wrote with Marco Villalobos. Anne Hathaway — her natural luminosity dimmed down to zero — plays Elena McMahon, a D.

There are myriad reasons why a film can fall far short of its ambitions. A lack of funds to truly achieve a vision, an unpolished script forced into production too early, the powers at be wanting more sellable stars that may be miscast, stubborn dedication to the source material that results in those involved getting lost in cinematic translation. The tell-all exposé on why exactly The Last Thing He Wanted is a failure on almost every level is likely many years away, but it’s been some time since such a promising concoction of talented ingredients has resulted in something so impossibly dull, gratingly lethargic, and utterly incoherent.

Directed by Dee Rees following her incredible debut Pariah and sturdy, resonant second feature Mudbound, she’s adapted Joan Didion’s novel with co-writer Marco Villalobos and cast the impressive leading trio of Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Dafoe. Elena McMahon...

Writer-director Dee Rees’ career continues to be a fascinating journey to follow. From her breakthrough feature debut, the soulful coming-of-age indie “Pariah,” to the Oscar-nominated literary adaptation “Mudbound,” the filmmaker has been confidently expanding her range with every new effort. That gutsy spirit is very much at the center of her latest, “The Last Thing He Wanted,” a fast-paced, ’80s-set political thriller with a murky tinge, whose pacing and visual style lands somewhere between “Z” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Sadly, the filmmaker’s panache only goes so far here, failing to translate the unnecessarily complicated script into something coherent to watch.

Adapted by Rees and Marco Villalobos from Joan Didion’s novel of the same name, “The Last Thing He Wanted” often feels exhausting and airless, so much that it borders on incomprehensible at times. Still, there is some nobility in this messy, massively scaled failure, an ambitious gamble...

There’s a reason why, over the course of a career that has spanned nearly six decades, Joan Didion’s remarkable body of work has received the film adaptation treatment just twice. In 1972, Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay for Frank Perry’s big-screen take on her novel “Play It As It Lays,” a celluloid turn that Didion followed up with various contributions to other scripts unrelated to her own books (including the 1976 “A Star Is Born” remake).

Despite mostly good reviews for the Perry film, even Didion seemed to quickly get hip to the fact that her work isn’t necessarily translatable to other mediums. Others surely got the memo, too, with almost a half a century going by before anyone else tried to turn Didion’s gimlet-eyed writings into a movie. And time has not been kind to the endeavor: and even less by...

Joseph Baxter Jan 23, 2020

Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck headline a stacked cast in Netflix movie The Last Thing He Wanted.

The Last Thing He Wanted is yet another high-profile film nabbed by streaming giant Netflix for exclusive consumption on its platform.

Brandishing a headlining duo of Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck, The Last Thing He Wanted is a historically-set drama that adapts the 1996 novel of the same name by Joan Didion, which, set in 1984, depicts the ordeal of a reporter (Hathaway) who – during the course of investigating the arming of the Contras – becomes placed in a most perilous position when the guilt-motivated task of visiting for her grieving father (Willem Dafoe) leads her to discover his role as a U.S.-backed arms dealer based in Central America.

Dee Rees directed the film, working off an adaptation screenplay she co-wrote with Marco Villalobos.

The Last Thing He Wanted Trailer

The...

A reporter winds up in the middle of an international arms deal, orchestrated by her own father, in the new trailer for The Last Thing He Wanted, out February 21st on Netflix.

The film is based on Joan Didion’s 1996 novel by the same name and centered around the Iran-Contra scandal. Anne Hathaway stars as a journalist named Elena McMahon who leaves the 1984 campaign trail to semi-reluctantly help her father, Dick (Willem Dafoe), run an errand that involves some light weapons dealing.

Still, as the trailer shows, this familial guilt...

From launching “Boys Don’t Cry” in 1999 to premiering “Call Me by Your Name” in 2017, the Sundance Film Festival has long housed some of the most transcendent, experimental, and provocative queer films of the last decades. This year is shaping up to be no different, with many of the most anticipated premieres promising thoughtful Lgbtq-related content. Though it’s impossible to know until we’ve seen the films, IndieWire culled the lineup, polled filmmakers and producers, and consulted GLAAD in order to create a list of the most exciting queer films playing the festival.

Laverne Cox executive produces the first cinematic history of trans representation in film, tapping the likes of Mj Rodriguez, Lilly Wachowski, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Yance Ford to provide commentary. New offerings from masters of the avant-garde Miranda July and Josephine Decker both promise queer elements, while “How to Survive a Plague” filmmaker David France returns to form...

The Oscar gods give and the Oscar gods take away. While Focus Features is finally giving Todd Haynes’ “Dark Waters” a primetime award-season November release date, Netflix will push its Dee Rees drama “The Last Thing He Wanted” toward a possible 2020 Sundance debut.

Focus and Participant Media teamed on the Haynes drama, which is based on the true story of environmental defense attorney Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) as he took on chemical polluter DuPont. It was adapted most recently by Mario Correa and first writer Matthew Michael Carnahan from Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”

Anne Hathaway stars opposite Ruffalo as Biliott’s wife, Sarah; she’s also the star of “The Last Thing He Wanted,” which Rees and Marco Villalobos adapted from the 1997 Joan Didion novel. The movie costars Ben Affleck and Willem Dafoe.

Another would-be awards title, Fox Searchlight’s “Wendy,...

The Oscar gods give and the Oscar gods take away. While Focus Features is finally giving Todd Haynes’ “Dark Waters” a primetime award-season November release date, Netflix will push its Dee Rees’ drama “The Last Thing He Wanted” to a 2020 Sundance debut.

Focus and Participant Media teamed on the Haynes drama, which is based on the true story of environmental defense attorney Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) as he took on chemical polluter DuPont. It was adapted most recently by Mario Correa and first writer Matthew Michael Carnahan from Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”

Anne Hathaway stars opposite Ruffalo as Biliott’s wife, Sarah; she’s also the star of “The Last Thing He Wanted,” which Rees and Marco Villalobos adapted from the 1997 Joan Didion novel. The movie costars Ben Affleck and Willem Dafoe.

Another would-be awards title, Fox Searchlight’s “Wendy,...

Author: Zehra Phelan

Anne Hathaway is currently in negotiations to star in Mudbound director, Dee Rees’ political thriller, The Last Thing He Wanted.

Based on the Joan Didion novel of the same name from 1996, the film will focus on hardscrabble journalist Elena McMahon who finds herself on dangerous ground as the Iran Contra Affair’s arms for drugs plot reaches its tipping point.

Marco Villalobos has written the screenplay, and in a released statement the film is being labelled as “a thrilling story of one woman, alone and unrelenting in a race against time,” Dallas Buyers Clubs’ Cassian Elwes optioned the book from Didion to develop it with Rees following their collaboration on Mudbound.

In the book, Elena McMahon, a reporter for the Washington Post who quits her job covering the 1984 Presidential primaries to care for her father after her mother’s death. In an unusual turn of events, she...