Review: Zodiac (2007)
David Fincher’s new film opens with a scene perhaps designed to play upon the expectations that many may have from “the director of Seven” as the ads promoting this new film helpfully remind us. It’s Fourth of July 1969, fireworks are exploding in a night that very eerily resembles “American Graffiti” by way of David Lynch. A young couple exchange dialogue creepy in its banality, the fireworks continue to light the night, and Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” begins to play on the car stereo as the couple notices a figure following them.
The scene has a deliberately heightened pitch and reality, and is the scariest, most masterful thing in Fincher’s filmography up until this point. The scene could more cynically be described as David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick 101 (you know the A-listers rendition of the slasher kill) but its so vital, so transporting, that Fincher makes it fly, and totally his own. These initial few minutes are also completely misleading of the next 150 that follow, which bear a closer resemblance to “All the President’s Men” or the great, largely unseen Korean film “Memories of Murder” in that it details the pursuit of dedicated men for answers that best case are largely irrelevant or worst case completely unattainable. “Zodiac” is about the quest to catch a serial killer, but like these prior films its more concerned with a more elemental, existenstial pursuit: for closure, for assurance that occassionaly the good guys win outside of the movie house.
This point is underlined in a dry sequence that can be found maybe an hour and a half or so in the picture: two of the killer’s pursuers Robert Graysmith, (played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the film’s one lesser, and unfortunately largest, performance) and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, in a great, lived in, dialed down cop performance) meet at a movie theatre showing “Dirty Harry”, who’s villain, “The Scorpio” is clearly modeled on the Zodiac. Toschi leaves mid-way, catching air in the lobby, and Graysmith finds him later, and assures him that they get him at the end.
The third protaganist and pursuer of the Zodiac is Paul Avery, played by Robert Downey, Jr. with his usual high, flamboyant wit. Avery is a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where Graysmith works as a cartoonist, and Tochi intersects with them while investigating one of the killings. The majority of the film is about the various dead ends and false starts the case presents. The good news is that this allows plenty of character actors to knock out some mini narratives and then split, my personal favorites being Anthony Edwards as Toschi’s partner, and John Carroll Lynch as a Zodiac suspect. The film may frustrate some viewers in its insistence on detailing seemingly EVERY missed opportunity, but its in these long passages that the film becomes something more than just “another serial killer movie”.
Zodiac is as much about the dead ends, the false starts, the bureaucratic red tape bullshit that haunts all of our lives, as it is about a sociopath. As all this becomes clearer we see that the tone of Fincher’s opening sequence was more than just an exercise in style. Larger than life, not quite of our existence, this is how these men saw the Zodiac killer: a dreadful modern myth they were cursed with just enough knowledge of to know they knew nothing. This is a great, humane film, and the first really major, timeless picture from David Fincher.
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