movie chat zodiac

Movie Chat: Zodiac

Zodiac

I don't think I was alone among David Fincher's fans in hoping (if not

expecting) that Zodiac was going to be The Godfather, or at least the

Goodfellas, of serial killer movies. Instead, Zodiac is more like the

All the President's Men of serial killer movies, which I found

somewhat disappointing.

It seems to me that in most of his movies, all of the interesting

stuff is happening on the surface - whether through visuals in Seven,

through tightly controlled set design and staging in Panic Room, or

spoken directly to the audience through the screenplay in Fight Club.

There's not much subtext in Fight Club, because Edward Norton's

voice-over lays out almost all of the major themes of the movie for us

and Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls illustrate these themes in a

relatively literal manner.

I think these movies are all superficial, but I don't really mean this

as a criticism. Rather, I'm most interested in what's already there on

their surfaces, which are densely packed with information and, in the

case of Fight Club at least, ideas.

(Not surprisingly perhaps, I think the best parts of Chuck Palahniuk's

early books are their essay-like sections that give Palahniuk a chance

to rant directly to the reader about the state of contemporary

culture. But their "story"-sections seem to me to be half-formed).

My problem with Zodiac, then, is that, on the surface, it's a couple

of extremely well-directed set pieces recreating the killings,

surrounded by a decent journalism/police procedural. But that's kind

of all it is and it never quite convinced me why I should really care

about this case. I never got the sense that the movie had anything to

say outside of itself, in the way that, say, Fight Club deals with a

whole bunch of "issues", and I also never got the sense of why the

Zodiac investigation itself deserved this kind of elaborate, expensive

dramatization. I mean, All the President's Men deals with an event

that shook the country and whose effect is still being felt today.

Actually, the procedural stuff went over well enough while I was

watching, but on reflection, it seems like the movie dropped the ball

with lots of little nuts-and-bolts stuff. I'm tempted to read the

books that it's based on, not so much because I'm interested in the

material, but because I bet that they clear up some of the points that

the movie passes over.

And Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt don't do anything with

the Zodiac murders, like, for example, putting them in a larger

context and exploring our fascination with unsolved cases like this,

as Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell do with the Jack the Ripper killings

in From Hell.

Nonetheless, I thought the movie was pretty engaging and interesting

for the first two hours. But then the procedural stuff ends and it

turns into a movie about a lone Robert Graysmith looking for the

truth. These scenes at the end aren't bad, per se (although one of

them - when he goes to visit the manager of the silent film theater -

is badly misconceived), but they're pointless. I never really got a

sense of why Graysmith let this obsession almost ruin his life. One

solution would have been to have a more critical take on him, in order

to get at why people become fixated on serial killers. The movie is

based on his books and he was involved in the production of the movie,

so it's kind of strange that the movie never bothers to get into what

drew him to this story in the first place.

Given the same material, someone like Hitchcock or De Palma would have

(I think) tried to get underneath it: to suggest what really drove

Graysmith to keep at the case even after everyone else has given up

because the answers that the screenplay offer are kind of stock.

Still, though, it's a well-made movie and the murder sequences are

very creepy and very different in style and feel from anything else

Fincher has done. I'll probably see it again when it comes out on DVD,

just to check whether or not there's more going on there than met my

eye.