Zodiac

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with that's going to stay with me for many months to come. The idea of director David Fincher re-entering the world of serial killers is exciting, and an easy concept to market. "From the director of Seven…" is the phrase that much of the publicity for Zodiac is built around. And while it's a very logical way to get butts in seats, it's about as misleading a campaign strategy as you're likely to face when it comes to film marketing. And I'll be the first to admit, Fincher tackling the complicated and troubling California case of the Zodiac killer is something worth getting excited and eager about, but those of you expecting wildly imaginative murder set pieces, haunting lighting design and a satisfying Hollywood ending are going to come out of this film more than a little annoyed. Instead, Fincher (with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, adapting the source material by Robert Graysmith) has made what might be the greatest procedural crime drama in modern film history.

There have been many great police dramas since, but I have to go back to Kurosawa's iconic High and Low to think of a detective piece that affected me quite the way Zodiac did. I love the film as much for what it doesn't do as I do for it's great accomplishments. Fincher has spent his entire career establishing himself as a filmmaker with a highly stylized visual style and great sense of pacing. But with Zodiac he's unlearned almost every trace of his cinematic legacy. His films have always done a great job of creating strong characters, but he's never dug into the minds of his characters like he does here. And not just one or two, but dozens.

Everyone who got close to this case suffered greatly, including Graysmith (played here with a beautiful fragility by Jake Gyllenhaal), a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who got sucked into the Zodiac case through his friendship with crime reporter Paul Avery (both men received direct or indirect threats from the Zodiac killer at various times over the many years this case stayed active). Just when you think Robert Downey Jr. (who plays the razor sharp and witty Avery) has nothing more to show us, he pulls a performance like this one out just to show us he's still king. The two men weren't exactly friends, but Avery used Graysmith's love of puzzles and solving code to his advantage. But as the film goes on, Avery (like so many others) becomes so obsessed with the case that the rest of his life falls to the wayside and eventually implodes. We believe Graysmith's gentler nature will keep him pure as he decides to research the case for a book, but his fall is almost more tragic as he and his wife (played by Chloe Sevigny) and kids drift apart.

But the newspaper connection to the Zodiac killer (who sent many letters to the San Francisco media) is only half of what this film covers. The police investigation, led by inspectors David Toschi (the always reliable Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (a really nice turn from Anthony Edwards), is certainly drier than the Graysmith/Avery storyline, but it's no less compelling. Imagine if finding this sly murdering bastard was your full-time job. This film follows the police down seemingly every dead end. More than once, you can almost smell that a suspect is guilty, but some small piece of evidence doesn't quite add up. In our age where crime databases, evidence and fingerprint records are a keyboard stroke away, watching these investigators circa the 1970s attempt to share cases of information across multiple jurisdictions is unbearable. Fincher captures this frustration to perfection, as small but important bits of evidence get lost or go unshared in the chaos.

And while we do see some of the Zodiac killer's handiwork throughout the film, this is not a movie about a serial murderer's grisly ways. Zodiac is a film about those who seek the truth. This isn't even a film about getting justice or revenge (the victim's families are given virtually no screen time). Instead, Fincher has crafted a film about obsession and the search, about the tiniest bit of information meaning so much to so many even though it leads them nowhere. And while the film ultimately does point the finger pretty clearly at a particular person as the most likely killer, it is the not knowing that motivates everyone in this story. I could spend an entire paragraph of this review discussing how almost every role in Zodiac is played by a familiar face, but that isn't really the point. This movie boils police work and investigative journalism down to their essential (and, yes, sometimes deadly dull) cores. The whole piece feels authentic, right down to the saltshakers on Graysmith's kitchen table, but this is much more than a history lesson. This is a slice-of-life profile of a terrified California, and it's several insightful character studies rolled into a near-perfect film. Fincher's visual stamp isn't entirely absent from the proceedings, but he makes the complicated and chaotic story the heart of this, his best, film.

Capone
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