Zodiac - Directed by David Fincher
'Zodiac" is the "All the President's Men" of serial killer movies, with Woodward and Bernstein played by a cop and a cartoonist. It's not merely "based" on California's infamous Zodiac killings, but seems to exude the very stench and provocation of the case. The killer, who was never caught, generously supplied so many clues that Sherlock Holmes might have cracked the case in his sitting room. But only a newspaper cartoonist was stubborn enough, and tunneled away long enough, to piece together a convincing case against a man who was perhaps guilty.
The film is a police procedural crossed with a newspaper movie, but free of most of the cliches of either. Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful. I could imagine becoming hopelessly mired in the details of the Zodiac investigation, but David Fincher and his writer, James Vanderbilt, find their way with clarity through the murk. In a film with so many characters, the casting, like eye witness testimony, is crucial; We remember a face once we've seen it.
The film opens with a sudden, brutal, bloody killing, followed by others not too long after -- five killings the police feel sure Zodiac committed, although others have been attributed to him. But this film isn’t a bloodbath. The killer does his work in the earlier scenes of the film, and then, when he starts sending encrypted letters to newspapers, the police and reporters try to do theirs.
The two lead inspectors on the case are David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). Toschi, famous at the time, tutored Steve McQueen for "Bullitt" and was the role model for Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Ruffalo plays him not as a hotshot but as a dogged officer who does things by the book because he believes in the book. Edwards' character, his partner, is more personally worn down by the sheer vicious nature of the killer and his taunts.
At the San Francisco Chronicle, although we meet several staffers, the key players are ace reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr., bearded, chain-smoking, alcoholic) and editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). These characters are real, and indeed the film is based on Graysmith's books about the case.
Graysmith is new on the staff when the first cipher arrives. He's like the curious new kid in school fascinated by the secrets of the big boys. He doodles with a copy of the cipher, and we think he'll solve it, but he doesn't. He strays off his beat by eavesdropping on cops and reporters, making friends with Avery, and even talking his way into police evidence rooms. Long after the investigation has cooled, his obsession remains, eventually driving his wife (Chloe Sevigny) to move herself and their children in with her mom. Graysmith seems oblivious to the danger he may be drawing into his home, even after he appears on TV and starts hearing heavy breathing over the phone.
What makes Zodiac authentic is the way it avoids chases, shootouts, grandstanding and false climaxes, and just follows the methodical progress of police work. Just as Woodward and Bernstein knocked on doors, made phone calls and met many very odd people, so do the cops and Graysmith walk down strange pathways in their investigation. Because Graysmith is unarmed and civilian, we become genuinely worried about his naivete and risk-taking, especially during a trip to a basement that is one of the scariest, tension building sequences I’ve ever seen.
Fincher gives us times, days and dates at the bottom of the screen, which serve to underline how the case seems to stretch out to infinity. There is even time-lapse photography showing the Transamerica building going up. Everything leads up to a heart-stopping moment when two men look, simply look, at one another. It is a more satisfying conclusion than Dirty Harry shooting Zodiac dead, say, in a football stadium.
Fincher doing a film that centers on research fits right at home in his filmography despite Zodiac’s lack of pulp. He seems to be in reaction against the slice-and-dice style of modern crime movies; his composition and editing are more classical, and he doesn't use nine shots when one will do. Fincher is an elegant stylist on top of everything else, and here he finds the right pace and style for a story about persistence in the face of evil. Fincher understands that true crime is not the same genre as crime action. That’s why it’s such a ballsy movie to make because anyone who knows the story of Zodiac knows the crimes were never definitively solved. Because Zodiac embraces irresolvability, it becomes hypnotically rewatchable. This is in large part due to Fincher’s famous penchant for detail. Zodiac the film gets all the details exactly right and because we can trust that Fincher’s intent was just that it’s easy to get lost in the film’s investigation. We’re working with all the same facts as any real life investigator.
I think to truly measure Zodiac’s achievement the simplest move would be to compare it to Se7en. That film was a massive hit and plenty of critics used its success to condemn Zodiac’s financial failure. What many viewers found seductive about Se7en was the way that its visual style basically enshrined the point of view of its antagonist. Darius Khondji’s photography painted John Doe’s view of the world for us all to see.
There is no such identification in Zodiac, which only ever adopts its villain’s point of view once, and even then, in an extremely specific way: At the end of the opening credit sequence, the camera is placed in a mail cart containing the first coded missive from the Zodiac to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a marvelously lo-fi visual effect, but it serves a crucial purpose all the same. It creates the impression, which is sustained with incredible focus and concentration for the film’s nearly three-hour running time, that the Zodiac Killer is as much an ephemeral, disembodied phenomenon as an actual flesh-and-blood person. Zodiac is less a movie about a serial killer than it is a movie about the idea of a serial killer, a fine distinction that transforms it into Se7en’s spiritual prequel, as well as a kind of coded apologia for the earlier film’s success. Where Se7en shrewdly exploited the public fascination with charismatic murderers to create a memorable piece of pulp fiction, Zodiac examines the roots of that fascination.
