This article was written exclusively for The Film Magazine by Leoni Horton of Leoni Horton Movies.
The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)
Director: Dee Rees
Screenwriters: Marc Villalobos, Dee Rees
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe, Edi Gathegi, Toby Jones
Joan Didion’s fiction has long been regarded as difficult to adapt, its elliptical prose and restrained emotional palette often feeling native to the page. When Dee Rees announced a film version of Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted with a cast led by Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck and Willem Dafoe, expectations were high. Rees had earned praise for her previous work, notably for her ability to find intimacy inside broader social stories. In theory, this pairing of director, source material and actors held a great deal of promise.
Unfortunately, the finished film never finds the measured intelligence of Didion’s novel. The adaptation frequently feels disjointed, offering a string of scenes that fail to cohere into a convincing narrative or to build the emotional stakes the story requires. Where Didion’s prose is economical but layered, the film is often blunt and diffuse, leaving characters underdeveloped and plot threads unresolved until a rushed final act attempts to tie everything together.
The story follows Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway), an Atlantic Post journalist whose investigation into suspected U.S. arms dealings with Central American rebels is abruptly shelved when she is reassigned to cover a U.S. presidential campaign. When news arrives that her estranged father, Dick McMahon (Willem Dafoe), is gravely ill, Elena abandons the campaign trail and flies to Florida to care for him. She soon learns that her father is involved in illegal arms trafficking and that a large shipment is en route to Central America. Too sick to make the trip himself, he wants Elena to take his place.
Once Elena steps into that role, the film increasingly slips into implausible moments and distracted staging. Promised money turns up as blocks of cocaine—one of which Elena inexplicably keeps with her for much of the film before casually abandoning it in a taxi. Pursued by a shadowy figure named Jones (Edi Gathegi), she obtains a false passport and flies to Antigua to meet American Ambassador Treat Morrison (Ben Affleck), whose personality on screen is surprisingly flat. Trapped in the region, Elena persists in following a scattering of thin leads to expose U.S. interference in Nicaragua, but the film rarely explains why any of these choices matter to her or to us.
Much of what makes Didion compelling is her narrative stance: a cool, third-person voice that comments indirectly, trusting readers to assemble meaning from what is left unsaid. A single line of her prose can hint at whole relationships and hidden motivations. The novel, for example, uses discreet references—details like a shared surgical scar—to suggest intimacy, loss and projection without spelling everything out. That restraint creates a readerly engagement in which we are invited to piece the puzzle together.
Rees’s adaptation opts for a more direct approach, making Elena the movie’s focal narrator and pushing scenes of explanation to the foreground. As a result, crucial interiority is lost. Moments that work as evocative, offhand clues on the page become abrupt or unearned in performance. The relationship between Elena and Treat, which in the novel implies complicated emotional echoes and private burdens, unfolds on screen with little of the nuance that would make their intimacy convincing. A scene that should register as quietly devastating reads as staged exposition: characters simply tell each other things the novel had previously suggested with far greater subtlety.
That pattern—replacing suggestion with blunt disclosure—runs throughout the film. Where Didion’s characters are often enigmas, their evasions integral to the narrative tension, Rees’s characters too frequently overshare. Attempts at emotional clarity feel forced, and those moments deprive the film of the haunting ambiguity that gives the source its power. Rather than capturing the hollowness Didion used to reflect political and moral emptiness, the film itself often feels hollow.
The performances mirror these problems. Anne Hathaway makes a sincere effort to inhabit Elena’s difficult mixture of determination and vulnerability, but the script offers her limited access to inner life. Ben Affleck’s Treat is muted to the point of disengagement; the performance rarely hints at the character’s hidden wounds or motivations. Supporting players—Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones, Rosie Perez—are given intermittent appearances that mostly deliver plot exposition rather than the layered character moments they are capable of creating.
Structurally, Didion’s novel disorients readers through a deliberately non-linear flow that slowly coalesces into clarity. The film’s pacing instead feels erratic, and the tidy explanations dropped into the final minutes come across as an afterthought rather than an earned revelation. By the time the narrative attempts to resolve itself, the emotional and political stakes have been too diffuse for the payoff to resonate.
The result is a film that struggles to translate Didion’s cool, insinuating prose into cinematic terms. Where the novel invites readers into a subtle act of interpretation, the film often removes that invitation, delivering information without the attendant mystery. For viewers unfamiliar with the book, the adaptation can seem confusing and emotionally thin; for readers of Didion, it may feel like a reduction of what made the original so engrossing.
Didion once observed, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” One can only hope that this adaptation will be remembered as an imperfect attempt rather than the definitive screen rendering of a complex and subtle novel.
2/24
Written by Leoni Horton
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