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It starts like all good thrillers since Hitchcock. Hannah and Owen are in their forties, they are beautiful, they love each other, they live in a pretty house on stilts near San Francisco. They met late in life, and their love has the taste of things we no longer expected. There is a shadow on the board – Bailey, Owen’s teenage daughter, who lost her mother when she was little, is having a hard time with her father’s remarriage, but nothing too bad. The day Owen disappears, at the same time as the FBI raids the premises of the start-up that employs him, Hannah and Bailey must come to terms with each other to solve the mystery of this man who seems to have had several lives.
Adapted by the novel’s own author The Last Thing He Said To Me (Laura Dave, 2022, Michel Lafon), The Last Thing He Told Me intertwines two rather superficial intrigues (the format of the series, seven forty-minute episodes, does not allow more to be done): the financial scandal, which pushes Owen to flee the city, and the reasons which make him fear being unmasked by the police. Part of the answer seems to lie in Bailey’s childhood memories, which lead the two women to fly to Austin, in search of Owen’s murky past.
Weakness of narrative processes
The somewhat oversold mystery of the series will, in the end, have less interest than the description of the fragile alliance that is tied between Hannah and her stepdaughter, interpreted with great sensitivity by Jennifer Garner, the unforgettable spyAliasand by Angourie Rice, who was the daughter of Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown (2021). The two actresses are doing well enough for us to ignore the relative weakness of the narrative processes, which advance the story with cutesy flashbacks – and worried sighs in front of the television. It wouldn’t be so bad if the series didn’t sometimes give the impression, vaguely unpleasant, of having been designed for an essentially “female” audience.
It’s especially unfortunate for Jennifer Garner. With her jaw and her square shoulders, the actress does not necessarily appear to be the best person to embody this woman led by her husband, apart, perhaps, for this sadness mixed with harshness that she has been dragging around since l Sydney Bristow era. Despite two decades of roles in the cinema, the actress, frozen in her age and her presentation, does not manage to make people forget the series which made her famous. Moreover, a short appearance, in the form of a wink, of Victor Garber, who was his father in Alias, immediately resurrects the memory of their pair.
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