A work of historical fiction set amid the 1984 U.S. presidential election, The Last Thing He Wanted is adapted by director Dee Rees and co-writer Marco Villalobos from the 1996 Joan Didion novel of the same name. It sees a sidelined, muckraking journalist (Anne Hathaway) abdicating the campaign trail in order to help her gun-running father (Willem Dafoe) out of a jam. In the process, she's marooned in Costa Rica, and runs afoul with the various clandestine parties in the American empire's subversive, reactionary missions in the southern hemisphere.
The juxtaposition of high melodrama and historical intrigue pushes the film's already convoluted plot to ludicrous extremes. But that manner of its dramatization is also the only interesting thing about the latest from Rees, her previous films being Pariah (2011), Bessie (2015), and Mudbound (2017, also distributed through Netflix). All of these films are far more narratively straightforward, so Rees' experimentation here -- adapting a late work by one of New Journalism's earliest and strongest voices, and attempting to translate the genre's sense of hyperrealism and chaotic blurring of fact and fiction -- is admirable on its face, and even rather successful at turns. The Last Thing He Wanted is best understood as a scandalization, if not a fully articulated satire, of liberal agitprop as a cinematic genre, particularly stories of lone journalists adversarially speaking truth to power, alone in heaving the journalistic institution and ideal through the morass of market cynicism and corporate or political subterfuge. Hathaway's character, Elena McMahon, is presented as a deadpan, tragicomic figure, whose semi-lucid misadventures take on the superficial content of many recent "strong female protagonist" narratives, but quickly spiral out into absurdism, such as when she begins an affair with the aptly-named Treat Morrison (Ben Affleck), a hardline anti-socialist Reagan flunky who makes a strange bedfellow indeed for Hathaway's broken-down liberal crusader. One could even see the implication of her father's early-stage Alzheimers as a direct reference to the background Reagan. What seems to be a fictionalized account of a genuinely held belief in the adversarial role of progressive media against the reactionary state, is actually a fairly clever exposé of a narcissistic fantasy, the belated answer to Steven Spielberg's interminable The Post.*
Unfortunately, none of this is served by Rees' surprisingly milquetoast visualization. Her collaboration with cinematographer Bobby Bukowski is a stark departure from her much more sensuous work with Bradford Young (Pariah), Jeff Jur (Bessie), and especially Rachel Morrison (Mudbound). The virtual non-existence of anything approaching the picturesque in The Last Thing He Wanted is in some sense motivated by the overall lack of stylization in the very genre that the filmmakers both emulate and then subvert. There's a deliberate lack of affect here, but it proves an insufficient lens through which to bring this melancholy, New Journalistic fable to life. Not like anyone's asking for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, here - that's obviously too far to the other extreme for the subject. But the the films with which The Last Thing finds the most emotional kinship, the works of cult auteur Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales), provide a good example of where to draw the fine line between bizarro narrative logic and shallow cinematic affect to evoke true absurdity, a feeling in the spectator of a jarring apartness from anything approaching a conventional catharsis in drama or spectacle.
* Bemusing canard: In Didion's original novel, McMahon actually does work for The Washington Post. Apparently unable to acquire permission to use the real newspaper's name and masthead in their film, the makers of The Last Thing He Wanted have opted instead for the fictional "Atlantic Post."
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