(From IMDb.com)

Choosing movies during the never-ending stay-at-home has turned into a Netflix scroll.

Oh, look, Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck in a 2020 thriller adapted from a Joan Didion novel.

Click for The Last Thing Wanted.

Dee Rees directed and co-wrote with Marco Villabos this adventure set in the 1980s.

It’s based on the Iran Contra affair.

That much I got by following along.

The rest …

Well, I will try for you.

Hathaway plays a journalist we meet taking photos in the jungle. She finds a story along with her equally zealous photo-taking friend, played by Rosie Perez. Back home in the newsroom, her editor pulls her from that lead and assigns her to cover the Presidential election. She’s asking questions on the trail, not taking photos, which confuses me because back then photographers took pictures and reporters asked questions, mostly, at least on newspapers the size of the one depicted in this movie. Anyway.

She travels to a lot of countries as she hrows in a caper for her ill father (played by always ready to be shady Willem Dafoe) and meets many nefarious acting folks as maybe it ties in with that discovery in the jungle and toppling governments. Hathaway’s Elena McMahon always seems to be on the verge of something. Being arrested. Being killed. Having a nervous breakdown.

At the midpoint Elisabeth and George dropped in for a short, masked living room hello. I haven’t seen them in a month during this crisis. The four of us sat, all six feet apart, and talked quickly, my eyes loosely on the screen on the wall.

Then I skipped back 15 minutes or so, thinking it would help reacquaint me with the plot. But, no. I still had no clue why Hathaway’s roque but very principled journalist and Affleck’s smarmy U.S. politico would ever in a billion years end up between the sheets.

And her always sad daughter on the phone from a boarding school further muddied my attempt to ground the plot.

Explain, please. (From IMDb.com)

I could read the novel to figure it out, fleetingly went through my head.

No. That would take way longer than this two hours. I’m just not that into this affair.