Anne Hathaway. Joan Didion. Dee Rees. This ain't your grandmother's women's movie. #book2movies

Anne Hathaway is in talks to star. The script is based on a book by the legendary Joan Didion. The screen adaptation will be directed by Dee Rees, the fabulous female director who gave us 2017’s gorgeous Mudbound based on the book by Hilary Jordan. Of course I’m in. I’m betting you are too.

Hathaway would star as journalist Elena McMahon, “a woman alone and unrelenting in a race against time.’’ 

Here’s how the publisher sums up the book. 

‘Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provacative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.

In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force—persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.

Written in 1996, Didion’s book is well worth reading now. Take a look at this snippet from Slate's review:

“In short, The Last Thing He Wanted looks like proof of what you may have suspected for some time: that for all its restlessness about form, Joan Didion's fiction is formulaic--even contrived. The exhilarating surprise of her new novel is that in it, she masters one of the most contrived forms of all, the thriller. Followers of Didion's studiously anticlimactic, fragmented fiction will find it hard to believe, but her fifth novel has perfect pitch and pace, and is hauntingly hard to put down.

I’ll put book on my TBR list. Plenty of time to read it, the film is in preproduction now. Once Anne Hathaway agrees I imagine things will speed up. We’ll see Hathaway next in Oceans 8 inspired by characters originally created by George Clayton Johnson. They’ve come a long way from the male characters Johnson created in his book!