Cliff Booth Lives: Fincher Collected the Debt
David Fincher directing a Tarantino script set in 1977 Hollywood is a collaboration that shouldn't work on paper and is going to be devastating in a cinema.
Brad Pitt walking back into a role is news. Brad Pitt walking back into *that* role — Cliff Booth, the quietly lethal stuntman from Quentin Tarantino's *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*, the one who maybe-probably-definitely fed his wife to a shark and smiled about it — is something closer to an event. The trailer for *The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth* dropped and the internet did the thing it does when something is genuinely, structurally good: it went quiet for a second before it got very loud.
David Fincher directing a Tarantino script set in 1977 Hollywood is a collaboration that shouldn't work on paper and is going to be devastating in a cinema. Tarantino writes the sunlight; Fincher controls what lives in the shadows underneath it. The original film gave us Los Angeles in 1969 as a kind of paradise with rot at the edges — Sharon Tate alive, the Manson family turned into punchlines before they could become monsters, nostalgia weaponised into something almost unbearable. A sequel that moves eight years forward, into the decade where Hollywood ate itself and called it art, feels less like fan service and more like finishing a sentence.
Netflix is distributing, which means the conversation about theatrical windows will start immediately and will be completely beside the point. You watch a Fincher film in the dark with the sound up. You do not watch it on your phone while your flatmate talks about their week.
What's worth noting — quietly, because the Pitt story is eating all the oxygen — is that the festival circuit is doing something interesting right now. Pablo Larraín has a San Sebastián contender called *My Sad Dead*, his first film set in Argentina rather than inside the consciousness of an iconic woman, which is either a pivot or an expansion depending on how much faith you've earned. Larraín has earned enormous faith. The BBC's *Ministry of Time* has added Adeel Akhtar and Ciarán Hinds to a cast that is now so good it feels like a threat.
And *Widow's Bay* won fourteen Emmys. Fourteen. Matthew Rhys compared it to Scooby-Doo, which is either the most self-deprecating thing a newly-crowned Emmy winner has ever said or the most accurate thing anyone has said about prestige television in years. Possibly both.
The verdict: Fincher plus Tarantino plus Pitt in 1977 Hollywood — on paper this is everything. In practice, it will be better than you're letting yourself believe.
