ZODIAC

• Year Released: 2007

• Runtime: 157 Minutes

• Directed: David Fincher

• Written: James Vanderbilt (Screenplay), Robert Graysmith (Book, “Zodiac”)

• Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, John Carroll Lynch, Brian Cox, Chloe Sevigny

• Oscars:

  • Won: None.

  • Nominated: None. But what do they know?

• IMDb Plot Summary: Between 1968 and 1983, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree.

The Screenplay. Although David Fincher exhibits a great deal of control over every aspect of his productions and so it’s easy to think of him as his work’s sole author, it’s worth shouting out the writer, James Vanderbilt; this screenplay is fantastic. For clarity’s sake, Fincher and Vanderbilt worked together for over a year researching the case details, but the words and initial idea for the story was Vanderbilt’s after he read Robert Graysmith’s book. Featuring three leads, spanning the geography of the Bay Area over 15 years, Vanderbilt manages to walk the tightrope of conveying the necessary facts while still telling an engaging story featuring memorable characters. Vanderbilt is in perfect command not just of the details we need to know but of how to communicate them to the audience. Not only is he meticulous in capturing specifics of the experience, but he makes sure that multiple characters discuss, debate, and agree on the potentially incriminating details (handwriting styles, boot size, military service, love of a film) that are meant to be red flags for the audience as the police begin circling suspects. The great trick is that this is a seamless effect.

 The film also has a unique structure, and how it uses its principal characters is fascinating. The first hour mostly involves watching the Zodiac’s attacks, the Chronicle’s receipt of his letters, and the absolute media frenzy that accompanied them anchored by Downey and Gyllenhaal. The second hour largely follows the investigation itself, as the letters decrease in frequency and the sprawl of the case grows and grows before suspects begin to surface – at this point, we’re spending most of our time with Ruffalo and Edwards, and both Downey and Gyllenhaal take a back seat. The final 40 minutes or so picks back up with Gyllenhaal as he opens his own, obsessive investigation into the case and his personal life crumbles around him as a result. It’s a very novel approach to such an involved subject matter and is crucial to delivering the thematic gut punch of the film; each of these three men encounter the unexplainable and run themselves into the ground trying to make sense of it.

The Cast. One more interlude before we get to the Man Behind the Camera. While “Great Acting” isn’t necessarily the hallmark of Fincher movies, he’s always managed to get great performances out of his leads (I still think Jesse Eisenberg deserved an Oscar for The Social Network) and this film is no exception. This is one of Jake Gyllenhaal’s greatest performances, and perfectly straddles the line between the warm rom-com Gyllenhaal and the darkly obsessive Gyllenhaal. He’s able to toggle between being a point of view character, carrying the dramatic weight of the film, and even ceding the scene to others when necessary. Similarly, it’s sometimes hard to watch this movie knowing that Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. would spend the next 15 years doing Marvel movies when they’re putting in such great work. Ruffalo balances the wiseass with the compassionate in his turn as the savvy but increasingly wrung-out Detective Toschi, and Downey is fantastic as the – naturally for him – rapid-quipping ace reporter Paul Avery who is most outwardly destroyed by his fruitless involvement in the world of Zodiac. John Carroll Lynch is scene-stealing in his brief appearance as Arthur Leigh Allen who plays his part in the story perfectly – all our flags are raised, but then again there’s nothing directly implicating him. Fincher populates the rest of the supporting roles with even more recognizable character actors doing typically excellent work: Brian Cox, Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney, and Donal Logue are all pitch perfect.

Fincher. Fincher’s job is to enhance everything that the screenplay is doing by bringing his full filmmaking prowess to bear. A few notes on his technical collaborators: his longtime editor and production designers work with him here, which ensures Fincher’s vision wouldn’t be compromised. This film was shot by Harris Savides, and with his help Fincher continued his pioneering mix of digital photography and effects to make the impossible come to life that he began doing in 1999’s Fight Club. He recreates what the Bay Area and a few of its most famous murders were like with breathtaking authenticity in typically chilling and alienating fashion. This movie is where the hallmarks of Fincher’s current style really emerge – almost inhumanly smooth camera movements match cool and understated color palettes to the dual effect of removing the violence’s gritty edge while also heightening its impact. There’s only three violent or disturbing scenes in this rather long movie, but they are as brutal and chilling as any you’ll find elsewhere, partially because of Fincher’s restraint behind the camera. That said, the suspicion that follows and each man’s inability to move on is what truly haunts.

Much has been written about the levels of perfection he strives for in his process: demanding an exorbitant amount of takes and laboring over the digital augmentations until the image he dreamed up is on the screen. It’s the perfect match to a story about an expertly thorough killer as well as the increasingly obsessive men who fell apart chasing him. The resulting effect on the audience is the same here as it is in his best work; we feel that we are puppets on a string just as the characters are. How he does it is very subtle, but the effect of him controlling the audience’s eye and feeling exactly what he wants, when he wants, is palpable.

Fincher also has a cosmically dark sense of humor: to demonstrate the effect of the unsolvable on not just three men, but the to-date reliable pillars of society they represent, Fincher lifts conventions of genre as the story changes focus. The first hour has bones of newspaper classics like All the President’s Men, complete with incessantly ringing phones, editor meetings, and reporters discussing the issues around their desks in hushed tones. As Detective Toschi begins his investigation in earnest, we’re treated to jargonistic detective banter between buddies and a trumpet-forward noir score that evokes the crime classics of yesteryear. It’s to this movie’s credit that those references feel a little deadened and out of step with the story that they’re in, since the rules of those cultural touchpoints carry no weight in the realm of the Zodiac; perhaps that’s why so much of the final 40 minutes following Graysmith’s descent into obsession feel a bit like The Conversation or another dark-hearted paranoid ‘70s thriller.

Zodiac and 2007. 2007 remains a very signature year in American filmmaking, particularly for stories reckoning with desecration through the eyes of – or at the hands of – broken and complicated men. There Will be Blood, No Country for Old Men, and Michael Clayton all fit this bill, were critical and commercial successes, and got a lot of Oscar love. A favorite of mine, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a seriously underrated and underseen entry with similar thematic frameworks even managed a couple of Oscar nominations. Comparatively, however, Zodiac went underseen by American audiences and received no Oscar love, but it was a mainstay on Critic’s Top 10 lists that year and has continued appearing on lists of best films of the 21st Century, indicating some serious staying power.

Thematically, Zodiac fits right in with those other masterworks, and I think is Fincher’s second-best behind The Social Network, perhaps the best American film of the 21st Century, so I don’t intend that as criticism at all. The film’s first scene is set against the backdrop of a 4th of July celebration, complete with the white picket fences, fireworks, and barbecues of an idealized America but the way Fincher films it is immediately deadened, distant, and alienating. This is the end of ‘60s, a decade of revolution and unrest that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the moon landing. This isn’t just a docudrama recreating the Zodiac’s killings but is a period piece that aims to capture the moment the light when out of our country’s eyes the same way it vanishes from our protagonists’ as they are absorbed by the bottomless and unsolvable. They are the true victims here, since the Zodiac disappears into a specter that haunts them for years. And after we’ve joined Graysmith in going all the way down the rabbit hole – complete with terrifying dead-end digressions – we’re victims too. We’ve become immersed in the details of murder, fingerprints, handwriting samples, suspects’ biographies, military records, taste in classic films, and just how many homes in California have a basement. After we emerge with what feels like clarity, though our answer would never hold up in court, our only reward is a quiet stare down in an anonymous hardware store while “Baker Street” plays over a tinny speaker system. The film’s closing credits tell us that Arthur Leigh Allen died before police could charge him, but that a fingerprint surfaced in 2002 that doesn’t match. “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, which played during the first Zodiac attack scene, has resurfaced; the murders stopped over 50 years ago, but the Unsolvable is still claiming victims to this day.