Netflix unveils the trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, an extended look at Brad Pitt’s return to one of his most popular and iconic roles from the past few years. David Fincher’s latest movie, scripted by Quentin Tarantino, eight years after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in a very different LA, in 1977, where Cliff as changed.
Cliff Booth, who substituted careers of physical stunt work for a more subtle, yet deeply more tangled existence, working as a fixer for a Hollywood studio. He serves in troubles that studios stir out of the limelight, such as theft, stalking, and extortion. The trailer begins with a frenzied alternation in the movie theater, such as sunlight, California highways, smoking rooms, and a feeling that violence and real-world speed are waiting just offscreen. Pitt plays on these scenes with mercamentic ease that we loved the first time around.
A return to a lighter side of the trailer happens with Booth’s admission that he doesn’t do stunts for his old pal Rick Dalton anymore. When explaining that Rick’s gotten to be too fat, he offers a wry smile while penning a playful dig at Leonardo DiCaprio, which was quickly (if not, divisively) taken by fans to be a backhanded compliment and drawing quick notice. Though DiCaprio isn’t even in the sequelTimothy Olyphant reprises his role as actor James Stacyothers populating this late-1970s Hollywood include, Scott Caan, Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Carla Gugino, Holt McCallany and several recognizable names.
Few projects have such a bizarre creative origin. Tarantino first penned the script with the plan to direct himself, then abandoned the idea and put the material away. Pitt convinced him to entrust the film to David Fincher, resulting in a collaboration of two disparate brands of filmmaking. Stylistically meticulous and restrained Fincher’s brooding sensibilities go head-to-head with Tarantino’s affection for period detail and serrated dialogue, and early reviews suggest the mixture is turning out to be both familiar and dangerous.
The film will first go out in a limited run in theaters, where it will debut in IMAX for a two-week stretch starting November 25 and end on December 8, before hitting Netflix on December 23. That hybrid approach has become more common for iconic streaming movies that still seek the grandeur and spectacle of a big screen experience. For a piece so rooted in Hollywood tradition, the IMAX release will likely give viewers an opportunity to see the intricacies and details of each shot on the large scale that was meant to be seen.
What’s so enticing about his re-appearance is the actor himself. In the first film, Cliff Booth was an auxiliary presence in what was traditionally-structured plot; a subtle but formidable presence, still awesome in his low-key mojo. The new film concentrates on Booth, respecting the years he’s spent trading off of what he learned, as a mature man finding himself very useful to a film industry that still demands individuals who are willing to go into its own dark back halls. (The trailer alludes to implicit moral blindness, but has not revealed the third act of the script, only hinting that it’s one job that needs the right skill set.)