Zodiac

A Film Freak Central Film Review by Walter Chaw

ZODIAC (2007)
***1/2 (out of four)

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starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher

Zodiac The best film of its kind since All the President's Men, David Fincher's Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism--though more fascinatingly, it's another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher's trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-'catchable' foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it's about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal--not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac's two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi's (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer's partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Time telescopes in Zodiac--years, decades pass. In its breadth and setting, it reminds of James Ellroy's epic novel L.A. Confidential, and the constant to which Fincher (once slated to direct a three-hour adaptation of Ellroy's The Black Dahlia) returns is the desire to peek in the head-sized hatbox: the inexorable desire to know. Based on the struggle to identify a clues-leaving serial killer in the delicate, liminal period bridging the death of Flower Power idealism and the birth of Watergate cynicism, the film finds a hero first in maverick columnist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), then in Toschi, then in Graysmith. Fincher's boldest stroke is in establishing a prelapsarian setting, moving from there into a murder (Ciara Hughes' Darlene Ferrin enacts the fatale play in just five minutes of screentime), a silent discovery by a stoic and faceless motorcycle cop, and finally the modern information stream of a bustling newspaper room. You're reminded of Alan Pakula's Washington Post mock-up, of course, and the comparison only deepens with the idea that the sanctity of the working press--in mortal peril now more than it has ever been in the last hundred years--is the centre of the universe. Between this and 2006's Superman Returns, there's a rich sociological vein to be tapped concerning the desire to retain literacy in an increasingly post-literate world, starting with this minor, notable number of hero-journalists and, by extension, the shining idealism of Zodiac, wherein a library is the most important tool in a sleuth's arsenal.

Not as flashy as Fincher's other films, Zodiac is no less a science-fiction thriller than Alien³ or Fight Club, no less a noir-drenched procedural than Se7en, and no less an architectural construct than Panic Room or The Game. Gyllenhaal grows more haunted and sepulchral as the film wears on, so that the mental and emotional disintegration of Eagle Scout (First Class) Graysmith shadows the decline of the American collective psyche from the not-so-hot late-'60s through to the antiseptic '90s. Fincher poses the suggestion that Graysmith is the new American gothic: a seeker of answers not armed with questions worth answering (by the time the case is "solved," decades have passed without new events), wandering among the ruins with his nose to a book. It might not be too much to wonder if Fincher isn't talking here about Kirkegaard's quest for spirituality in all the tiny, mortifying little details of existence. Watching Zodiac somehow approximates the feeling of opportunities lost for human connection--a sequence where the family of a convicted pederast is interviewed rings especially hopeless. I feel like Fincher's found the perfect vehicle for his hallowed, echoing coolness in this story of lives given over to the vain pursuit of meaningful union. Graysmith declares that the only thing he wants is to look the Zodiac Killer in the eye and know that it's him. Looking back, I see traces of that desire in each of Fincher's protagonists. Looking back, I see traces of that desire in every pursuit of Man. Slow-moving, dense, and beautiful in its Longfellow on laudanum sort of way, Zodiac is in awe of the essential need, whatever the consequence, for a taste of the fruit.-Walter Chaw