untitled
ZODIAC
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: James Vanderbilt
Internet
Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: A-
2007.
Zodiac is
part of the serial-killer subgenre, and the first thing it does it get
the killer’s motivations out of the way by playing the Three Dog
Night cover of “Easy to be Hard” over a Northern California
Fourth of July:
How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?
Easy
To be hard, easy to be cold.
And, thankfully, that’s about all the psychology that Fincher offers. Zodiac,
after all, isn’t about what would drive someone to kill, but, by
focusing on the twenty-five year investigation into those killings,
about what would drive someone to care about them; it isn’t about
the banality of evil, but the banality of the pursuit of evil. Who was
the man who called himself “Zodiac” who killed at least
five people in California during the end of 1960’s and the dawn
of the 1970’s and took credit for many more? There’s only
one way to find out—to the library!
Based on a couple of books by Robert Graysmith, played by Jake
Gyllenhaal, the movie is essentially his story, though for most of the
first act he is hidden in the background. Graysmith was a cartoonist at
the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the newspapers that the Zodiac sent
his rambling, threatening letters and cryptic cryptograms to for
publication, who gradually becomes obsessed with the case. First aided
by his newsroom desk-neighbor Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and later
by Detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), among others, Graysmith is like a
Woodstein with half a dozen Deep Throats, and the film has drawn
comparisons to All The President’s Men; I saw a bit of
Jim Garrison in him, too, as he poured over boxes of files while his
marriage fell apart around him. But whereas Garrison, and Woodward
& Bernstein, were trying to save the country, or at least uncover
information that would have far reaching effects, Graysmith, whose
investigation only gets more intense as the killings stop, just needs
to know, just for himself.
Fincher brilliantly recreates the arc of emotional and psychological
intensity behind this obsessive exploration into the killer’s
identity: early in the film, when finding and arresting the Zodiac
could still save lives, the story is frightening, exciting, and
gripping, tapping into the actual hysteria of the times; but the
suspenseful aura of fear that hangs over the film soon feels
dragged-out, intentionally, as Fincher follows of the lead of the
dragged-out quality of the case itself. Lots of loose-threads and
false-leads go nowhere, and many of the characters—and most of
the country—simply move on with their lives; as Det. Toschi
notes, “people get old, they forget…” but those,
like Graysmith and by association the viewer, who don’t get out
while they still can get trapped in a destructive downward spiral of
obsession that feels increasingly trivial. As the film once hurtled
forward with titles like, “two hours later”, “two
days later”, it soon slows and the titles read, “three
weeks later”, “three months later”, and Zodiac, intelligently, descends into mundanity.
But that’s not to say that it’s ever boring, at least not for this recovering Unsolved Mysteries
addict. (That was a self-deprecating swipe at myself, not at the film.)
Even during the telephone conversations that deal with jurisdictional
privilege and the bureaucratic red tape, even as the film’s
emotional character goes from frightening suspense to prosaic, though
beguiling, mystery, it’s always absorbing and funny, too,
eliciting chuckles from my date and I even during the grisly
recreations of the murders themselves. The acting is superb, the
cinematography (by Harris Savides, cementing his reputation as arguably
the finest of his generation) is astounding and the soundtrack
(“Hurdy Gurdy Man” never sounded so good!) is marvelous. On
all accounts, Zodiac is a great film, a rarity nowadays that,
for its attention to detail, wouldn’t be anywhere near as
effective as a Wikipedia entry.
--
Henry Stewart
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