The US writer’s acerbic crispness is ill-served by a new adaptation of her 90s thriller The Last Thing He Wanted – but other Didion works are just waiting to be streamed…
There are certain novels that get widely branded by critics as “unfilmable” – usually only after someone has gone to the trouble of trying to film them. The term is rarely justified: even the most abstract and abstruse prose can translate to the screen with enough interpretive bravado and rich visual imagination. (Consider Jonathan Glazer’s startling reinvention of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin or David Cronenberg’s thrilling, deranged take on William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch as examples that beat the odds.) Still, it is more often attached to films that can fairly be regarded as failures, and it’s with a heavy heart that I add Dee Rees’s perplexing new adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted to that list.
The second of Netflix’s fresh-from-Sundance titles to head to the streaming service – after the lower-profile but superior Horse Girl, discussed last week – was raked over the coals at the
Utah festival last month. Seemingly lost in the maze of Didion’s densely plotted 1996 thriller – about a morally upright
Washington journalist (played with earnest commitment by Anne Hathaway) stumbling upon far-flung skulduggery as she covers the 1984 general
election – it’s murky and overwritten, lacking the stylistic conviction of Rees’s earlier films Pariah and Mudbound. Head over to
Netflix if you’re curious – a curiosity it certainly is – but the streaming giant’s best offering for the author’s devotees remains her nephew Griffin Dunne’s literate, intimate documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.