The Last Thing He Wanted is a 2020 political thriller film directed by Dee Rees, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Joan Didion, from a screenplay by Rees and Marco Villalobos. The film stars Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez, Toby Jones, and Willem Dafoe.

Plot

Elena McMahon is a journalist reporting out of the Atlantic Posts Central American bureau in El Salvador who is forced to flee during the civil war. A few years later she is pushing to reopen the bureau, but her editor reveals that Congress is secretly pressuring the paper to dial back their coverage of Central and South American affairs, so reopening the bureau is not an option. Instead, he reassigns Elena to cover Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984.