Review: The Last Thing He Wanted (Sundance 2020)

PLOT: A journalist (Anne Hathaway) covering the war in Nicaragua circa 1984, is thrown into danger when she agrees to do a weapons deal for her gunrunner father (Willem Dafoe), who’s suffering from dementia.

REVIEW: It’s hard to fathom what went wrong with THE LAST THING HE WANTED. Here you’ve got an adaptation of a well-received novel by Joan Didion with a star-packed cast and an A-list director, funded by a company known for cutting their directors a lot of slack. But, rather than result in a good film or even an interesting misfire, THE LAST THING HE WANTED is absolutely disastrous and virtually incomprehensible from one scene to the next, giving viewers the feeling that huge chunks of the movie were cut out at the eleventh hour. And that’s not all that’s wrong with the jarring adaptation.

Anne Hathaway went all-in on what should have been a showcase role, but she doesn’t display the edge the character needed, with us having to believe that her journalist character, Elena, who starts the film with a soliloquy on the evils of war profiteering, would suddenly chuck everything she believes in to sell arms to the Contras. The pretext is that she’s doing it for her father who’s in over his head, but she’s shown to despise him, and even once he’s out of the picture, her motivation remains frustratingly incomprehensible. She keeps saying she’s trying to get to the truth, but what is the truth exactly. That she sold guns?  That the Contras are bad (this is shown by a gratuitous scene where a dog is murdered)? That the U.S is involved? If so, then why does she immediately fall into the arms (and the bed) of a shadowy operative played by Ben Affleck, who she already knows is connected to a politician she’s been shown not to trust.

Again, it feels like chunks are missing here. No one fares any better, with Ben Affleck listless in a thinly written role. As much as I like him, he’s got very little to work with and seems bored and disinterested throughout. Willem Dafoe is good as Hathaway’s dementia addled father, but there’s no real meat to the role, and if there was it was cut out, with his unceremonious exit from the film puzzling. Rosie Perez’s photojournalist character has no urgency beyond doing what Hathaway demands she does throughout, although Mel Rodriguez (“The Last Man on Earth”) does fine work in a showy, small role as an unseemly crony of Dafoe’s.

For much of THE LAST THING HE WANTED I felt pretty stupid, as from one scene to another I had virtually no idea what was going on. At first, I chalked this up to being tired after a day full of movies at Sundance, but the writers exiting the film en masse during the end credits were all scratching their heads. None of us were able to make sense of huge chunks of the film, which is pretty sloppy for a movie that, given the talent involved, was likely originally intended as an awards caliber film. Instead, it’s a major misfire for all involved, especially Rees, whose last film, MUDBOUND, was terrific. Luckily, it’s also the kind of movie that, hopefully for all involved, will hit Netflix without too much fanfare, allowing it to go largely unseen while all can move on to other things. There’s a whole lot of talent on display here, but somewhere, somehow things went disastrously awry.