At the Movies: Zodiac
Every now and then, and maybe even once a year if you’re lucky, you get a film that is so new—or at least that uses old themes and materials in so new a way—that it stays in your head for days. David Fincher’s Zodiac, about the frenzy that surrounded the Zodiac killer in the late 1960s and the aftermath of the hunt for him, is the best film so far of the young season, as shattering and innovative in its way as United 93 was at this time last year.
Working with a script by James Vanderbilt that is remarkable for both its rich detail and its lucid narrative, Fincher has gone against the grain of just about every Hollywood trend of the last two decades and made a movie about a serial killer that can be watched by adults. The Zodiac murders have had several treatments, including a low-budget 2005 film, Zodiac Killer, about a man “inspired” by the original crimes, and of course the Clint Eastwood vehicle Dirty Harry, in which Clint gets to administer the frontier justice that San Francisco lawmen never did.
That’s the problem if you intend to make a serious film on the subject: The Zodiac killer has never been caught, though many enthusiasts of the case insist they know who did it, and Fincher’s film offers a plausible suspect. The real subject of the movie, as with George Sluizer’s Spoorloos (1988)—the original French version, not the wimpy American remake—is how people under stress can live with uncertainty. There are no heroes in Zodiac, only people, all of them based on real-life people, and all of them ring true. Robert Downey, Jr., plays the San Francisco Chronicle’s ace crime reporter, Paul Avery, a man who becomes so dogged in his pursuit of the killer that he becomes caught in an alcohol-fueled downward spiral. Mark Ruffalo is the legendary SFPD homicide detective David Toschi, whose work inspired the characters in Steve McQueen’s Bullit and Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, as well as Michael Douglas’s detective in The Streets of San Francisco. Ruffalo doesn’t play him as heroic, though, but as an emotionally scarred veteran who can still do the police work required of high-profile cases but no longer has the chops to deal with the attendant celebrity.
Best, of all, perhaps, is Jake Gyllenhaal, as the cartoonist Robert Graysmith, a puzzle aficionado who becomes so preoccupied with deciphering the killer’s coded messages that it costs him his marriage. (His wife is played by Chloe Sevigny in a brief, sharp characterization.) Gyllenhaal starts out as if he’s playing Jimmy Olsen and grows into the character as the story progresses. At the end, he’s the only character who seems at least partly triumphant (in real life Graysmith wrote a book that furnished much of the material for Vanderbilt’s script).
What is perhaps most remarkable about Zodiac is that at every turn Fincher opts for the complex and the layered over the obvious and the melodramatic. A veteran video director (Madonna, Sting), he has his fans. The overwrought Se7en (1995), with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, is a virtual compendium of slacker-era thriller clichés, and the well-made Panic Room (2002) was nothing but high-tech melodrama. His best film, Fight Club (1999)—well, the number one rule is you don’t talk about Fight Club, but suffice it to say that Fincher did add another dimension to Chuck Palahniuk’s trendy novel, though that still makes only two dimensions.
The temptation is to say that Zodiac has more depth than Fincher’s previous films only because of its script, but a director must first appreciate subtlety before he can convey it. In Zodiac Fincher never goes for the easy explanation or identification. For instance the San Francisco of the summer of love isn’t drenched in incense and marijuana fumes but is a multifaceted, multicultural city reflecting shades of dread. Fincher has drawn his inspiration from a number of sources, most notably from the 1932 suspense classic The Most Dangerous Game, with Joel McCrea (a favorite film, by the way, of the real-life Zodiac killer) and Fritz Lang’s silent German expressionist landmark M(1931), with Peter Lorre—the difference being that that film is seen from the point of view of the psychotic killer while Zodiac is seen through the eyes of those who are obsessed with the killer.
It’s not a film calculated to appeal to fans of Fight Club and Fincher’s other movies. Zodiac represents a great leap forward in maturity for David Fincher. Here’s hoping it signals a great leap forward in maturity for his audience too.