zodiac 2007

Zodiac (2007)

You kind of have to be an obsessive nerd to really love David

Fincher's Zodiac. I'm an obessive nerd, hence I loves me some Zodiac.

Being an obsessive nerd means I'm consumed with deciding where it

belongs in the Fincher canon with Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room

(As an obsessive nerd, I also feel obligated to at least name The Game

and Alien 3, even though don't belong in the same category). At this

point, I feel like it might be the best of all of them but I

definitely need to see it a second time, and I definitely want to (say

it with me one last time: obsessive...nerd...)

Though reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, most of the people I

know personally who saw it were decidedly lukewarm and my trusted

chums on the utterly essential podcast Filmspotting weren't a whole

lot hotter. But I had two hours and forty minutes to kill and I do

enjoy all the genres the movie appeared to be from the trailer: a cop

film, a serial killer movie, a horror film, a thriller, a chase movie,

and a period piece that doesn't call attention to its period-ness.

Zodiac is all of these things -- and it is all of these things rather

successfully, I think -- but it is primarily a story of the rabid

pursuit of an illogical goal. Robert Graysmith said so himself in his

introduction to the book on the Zodiac Killer that formed the basis

for Fincher's film: "If there is one key word for the entire story of

the Zodiac mystery, it is obsession." In some ways, I think that makes

Zodiac, whatever details Fincher leaves out of the true chronology of

events, one of the most faithful adaptations of all times. Obsession

is palpable in nearly every frame: from the heroes, from the villains,

and, above all, from the director himself.

(And, yes, as further proof of my own wacked out brain, I know this

quote is in Graysmith's book because I left the movie theater and

promptly walked over to a large, incorporated book seller and

purchased the mass market paperback edition of it -- a

characteristically fantatical and overenthusiastic gesture on my part)

Graysmith was just a cartoonist at The San Francisco Chronicle when a

psychopath began writing letters to the media confessing to several

murders in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 and 1969. He also sent

complex code ciphers that he demanded be printed in the paper, or he'd

kill more. The case was never officially solved, and to this day its

not entire clear who Zodiac was and even what crimes he committed and

which he simply took credit for. There's a great deal of confusion

surrounding the entire case, right down to what the killer looked

like: different witnesses had different physical descriptions, so

Fincher even got different actors to play Zodiac, based on the

specific incident.

All the performances are dynamite, right down to the little ones,

including Brian Cox as a lawyer who gets embroiled with the Zodiac

when he demands to speak with him on live television, and Anthony

Edwards (sporting an absolutely glorious toupee...Nicholas Cage, you

need to work with Edwards' wigist ASAP) as Mark Ruffalo's exhausted

partner in the SFPD. The murder scenes are cover-your-eyes terrifying,

and the police investigations absolutely riveting. Maybe I'm crazy,

and I was the only one laughing in the theater, but I thought the

movie was also quite hilarious at times. But you've got to be as much

of a nut as you are an obsessive nerd to get Fincher's sense of humor

(Remember Fight Club? It's like Fight Club except the actors don't

sell the jokes).

On my good friend Mike Anderson's blog, Tativille, someone critiqued

James Vanderbilt's screenplay for feeling "incomplete" (in not

including enough on Paul Avery's life after he left The Chronicle, for

example) and for its shifting narrative focus. They were

well-reasoned, and well-argued criticisms, but I disagreed: Avery's

life after The Chronicle is also his life after The Zodiac, and thus

largely irrelevant to the film, except in the ways it can teach us how

the Zodiac investigation impacted and, to varying degrees, destroyed

the men who undertook it and, to my mind, Fincher and Vanderbilt

address all of these issues adequately. And I dug the multiple

perspectives as well, if only because through them I felt Fincher and

his own fevered desire for the truth about Zodiac coming through. In

essence, he is committed to presenting the most interesting, the most

disturbing, the most truthful facts of the Zodiac case at any given

moment. At times, that means we must follow Toschi, and other times it

means following Avery and, later, Graysmith. Sometimes that means

seeing the Zodiac's killings, or seeing acts that could have been

committed by the Zodiac.

The ultimate star of Zodiac isn't the killer, or even Gyllenhaal,

Downey, or Ruffalo. Instead, it's the weird specter of dread and

fixation that hung over San Francisco and many of its citizens like a

fog rolling over the Golden Gate Bridge. It's the same specter I felt

when I walked out of the theater and over to that bookstore to buy

Graysmith's book. I understood the need to know more, loved the way

Fincher showed me everything he could, and appreciated the slight hint

at the end that there was even more out there for me to discover on my