Make no mistake about it, I am on the Dee Rees bandwagon. Rees was the first Black woman nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, for 2017’s “Mudbound” (2017), but more people need to catch up to her 2011 indie debut “Pariah,” which dealt with a closeted black teenager having to deal with the realization that she might be gay. The film was under-seen and under-reviewed back in December of 2011, however, with Rees now hitting the big time, “Pariah” needs to be re-evaluated for this new decade.
Hitting the big time is indeed what has happened to Rees, how else do you explain the significant budget increase of her latest film, the Netflix-distributed “The Last Thing He Wanted,” not to mention the stacked cast she has at her disposal, which includes the likes of Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, and Willem Dafoe.
Based on and adapted from Joan Didion‘s similarly-titled novel, “The Last Thing He Wanted” is set in the middle of the 1980s Contra wars in Central America. Hathaway plays a D.C. journalist (Hathaway) who ends up getting sucked into the very Contra drama she is writing about.
The film makes its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival tomorrow and is released globally on Netflix February 21st, 2020.
Alongside Blanchett, the film features a wildly eclectic ensemble including Dave Bautista, Lily-Rose Depp, Riley Keough, Léa Seydoux, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Chris Pine