Dee Rees' 'The Last Thing He Wanted' Is A Messy But Admirable Adaptation [Sundance Review]

“Some real things have happened lately,” growls Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway) early – and late – in Dee Rees’s adaptation of Joan Didion’s “The Last Thing He Wanted,” and perhaps an advisory is in order, for this mostly positive review of a film that’s already widely reviled: I could just listen to Hathaway read Didion’s prose for hours. She wraps her fists around those words and squeezes them tight – “We were moving fast. We were traveling light. We were younger. I was younger” – and by the end of the first voice-over, this viewer was all in. The film that follows is, admittedly, a bit of a mess. It’s also compelling, energetic, and well-acted, finding one of our most intriguing filmmakers all but flinging herself outside of her comfort zone.

Elena is a reporter for a fictional D.C. daily; she specializes in on-the-ground reporting on Central American conflicts. We first meet her in El Salvador, circa 1982, and catch up two years later, as she’s poking around the still-nascent Nicaraguan Contra story when her nervous editor freezes that desk and puts her on Reagan’s coronation campaign. She goes on leave to care for her ill father (Willem Dafoe), with whom she has – to put it charitably – a complicated relationship; he’s a shady character up to his neck in a shady deal, and he pleads with her, from his hospital bed, to see it through for him.

And thus our heroine finds herself in the very region she’s trying to report on, bluffing her way out of a series of increasingly dicey situations. There are coups and spooks and all sorts of trouble, and I don’t know what to tell you except that it’s entertaining. Reese is clearly having a good time playing in this sandbox, reveling in the period costumes and cloak-and-dagger staging and tense score; while certainly faithful to the source material, she’s also calling back to the many political/investigative thrillers of that era, pictures like “Under Fire” and “Salvador,” even down to replicating their gratuitous romantic subplots.

Most importantly, those were thrillers driven by character as much as plot, and ‘Last Thing’ plays best when it echoes that focus. Its biggest flaw is that there’s simply too much plot to handle gracefully, so we end up with some less-than-elegant exposition dumping (the catch-up scene with her negligent father is particularly egregious), and too many occurrences of relevant dialogue repeated for narrative clarity (but with artful echo). That’s a wheezy device even if you are doing an ‘80s throwback.

The film bears other markers of a long, difficult edit – it’s been in the bay for something like a year now, and in many ways, it shows. But how can you hate a movie where Toby Jones, whose appearance in a something like this feels all but inevitable, shows up in the third act to luxuriate in a beach estate and say things like, “I guess I stay because I have a high tolerance for pleasure”?

Above all, we’ve got a tremendous performance here by Hathaway – not just for those Didion recitations, but for the fierceness of her physicality: how she carries herself, glares, listens, smokes. Dafoe can play this kind of character in his sleep, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to watch him do so. Ben Affleck’s character is a bit of a puzzle (his existence doesn’t make a lot of sense, until it makes too much), but this kind of steely-eyed opportunist is a good niche for him to keep working in. And Rosie Perez makes every film better; that’s just science.

Filmmaker Dee Rees is a bit of a puzzle, in the best way; after bursting onto the indie scene with “Pariah,” a film clearly personal and somewhat autobiographical, she’s spent the ensuing years directing a made-for-HBO biopic and, now, her second prestige literary adaptation. When you expect her to turn left, she veers right. Read too many of the reactions to this one, and you’d think she drove off a cliff. But there’s much to admire in “The Last Thing He Wanted,” and plenty of signs that her unique talent is intact. [B]

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