The new Netflix film The Last Thing He Wanted has reportedly been doing great numbers for the platform since it debuted on February 21, but it doesn’t live up to expectations.
When I pulled up the film two days ago, there was an icon in the corner proclaiming “#2 in the U.S. Today.” And on Friday, Netflix said it was their most popular movie of the week. However, the film is not actually good, and given the names attached, I don’t understand how it failed.
The Last Thing He Wanted is based on the 1996 novel by Joan Didion. It is the fourth film from writer-director Dee Rees, whose Pariah, Bessie, and Mudbound were all critical darlings.
By all accounts, she is one of the most exciting young American directors who has emerged in the past decade.
The cast features Anne Hathaway in the lead role, with Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Rosie Perez rounding out the ensemble. How is it possible that all this pedigree turned in such a forgettable nothing of a movie?
The plot of The Last Thing He Wanted is this: Hathaway plays Elena McMahon, a prominent, ambitious, intelligent, hard-working journalist in the 1980s. Elena is taken off her usual beat, covering the Nicaraguan civil war directly from Central America, and put on the 1984 election, following Ronald Reagan around the country.
When Elena’s estranged father, Dick (played by Dafoe, who is, frankly, the only actor who feels alive in the film), is hospitalized, she quits her job to take care of him. Dick asks her to finish his final job — as an arms dealer?? — and Elena feels like she has no choice but to follow through, taking her back to Central America in a much more precarious situation.
At least, I think that’s what the movie is about. It’s confusing and vague. I don’t understand why she agrees to do this for her father, whom she has a strained relationship with. Does she want to give him “the last thing he wanted?”
Anyway, I think she eventually hooks up with the government and her actions become more or less sanctioned as an undercover agent, but I’m not actually sure.
The only scene in the film that had any spark is one of its first: Elena meets Dick for a drink before she gets on Reagan’s press corps plane to cover a campaign event in Kansas. There is a ton of exposition about their backstory together, how Dick left Elena and her mother, how Elena made it on her own, all in this over-the-top and on-the-nose dialogue, with Hathaway grandstanding and scenery chewing.
Dafoe, however, brings a deeply authentic, human performance as a regretful father trying to make amends. Dafoe’s great strength as an actor is that he never feels like he is acting; he is simply existing, always in the correct emotional register of the character. He is always extraordinary, even when the movie doesn’t deserve it.
After that, we enter a land of intense confusion. No amount of rewatching could help me figure out this movie, and I had to make assumptions in order to continue watching the film. In this way, the experience of watching the film became a guessing game about what had just transpired.
For example, at one point I was sure that Dick had died off-screen (Hathaway was doing some A+ internal emoting and I didn’t understand the motivation), but he was back in his hospital bed a couple scenes later.
Unfortunately, The Last Thing He Wanted is also boring, which is a worse sin. If the discrete scenes had been captivating, you’d be more willing to forgive a little narrative confusion. In fact, the confusion could be taken as intentional in that case, even if it was incidental. An audience will forgive a lot if there is something keeping them engaged.
Elena has an affair with Treat Morrison (Affleck), who is some sort of United States federal official involved with her situation. I don’t really know how. There’s some problem with her passport that makes Elena stare into the middle distance with a horrified expression. I am still not sure what the issue was. But Morrison helps her out and then they have sex.
But I was never invested in the danger Elena was in, nor was I invested in this romantic relationship, nor her friendship with her coworker Alma (Perez). I was never interested in the fact that Elena has sent her daughter to boarding school, probably intended to be a parallel with her father abandoning her as a child, but that thread is totally left on the table, unremarked upon.
Beyond the narrative, the cinematography of The Last Thing He Wanted is deeply, profoundly, offensively ugly. Netflix has long claimed they don’t dictate the particulars of craft, but I have to think there is a secret house style they insist upon.
It is incredibly rare for their films to contain darkly lit or overly shaky cinematography, probably insisted upon due to the fact that these films will be primarily viewed at home. Even Netflix films with objectively great cinematography such as Roma and The Irishman have crisp, clean, visible images.
It’s hard to imagine Netflix instructing Alfonso Cuarón and Martin Scorsese to adapt their cinematography accordingly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a conversation was at least had.
I can’t imagine that anyone would watch this movie and get anything out of it. The critical response has been terrible, and in just 36 hours since I watched it, the icon in the corner about its “rank” has fallen from #2 to #10. It certainly seems like a quick dropoff as word of mouth spreads.
It is still baffling to me that the movie is not a success. I’m rooting for Rees, and her career up until now has been uniformly stellar. And here, the ducks were in a row but they just didn’t fly. The Last Thing He Wanted ended up being the last thing I wanted.