Zodiac: David Fincher Batters America's Innocence (Again) While Indulging
His Love Of All The President's Men
Since David Fincher is the man who delivered Gwyneth Paltrow's head in
a box at the end of Se7en, an elegy to male violence in Fight Club,
and essayed a thrill-ride in paranoia in Panic Room, it's easy to see
Zodiac as a softening of his position.
It's true, the film is about a serial killer. There are nasty moments
in which people die horribly. There are also lengthy bouts of
jeopardy, including a Psycho-like scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal
visits the house of a suspect and finds himself lured into the
basement. In a horror film, it wouldn't be hard to predict what might
happen next. In Zodiac, which aims to unravel the fear, no such
prediction can be made, but that doesn't lessen the claustrophobia,
heightened by the sound of footsteps upstairs, the light dimming, and
the siren call of a whistling kettle. The fact that Gyllenhaal is as
pretty as Bambi, and roughly as tough, does nothing to alleviate the
dread.
Zodiac is based on two books by Robert Graysmith about the killer who
terrorised the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) was a cartoonist on the San Francisco
Chronicle whose initial fascination with the coded symbols used in
letters from the killer grew to an obsession. The cartoonist carried
on investigating the crime long after police had closed the file, and
became an authority on a killer who achieved pop cultural notoriety.
The Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry is loosely based on Zodiac, and
Harry, the unconventional cop played by Clint Eastwood, was modelled
on Dave Toschi, who investigated the real-life case. Toschi is played
here by Mark Ruffalo, as a kind of wisecracking Columbo with a
fondness for Animal Crackers.
Fincher's interest in the story is rooted in personal experience. He
recalls Zodiac being a playground bogeyman in his San Francisco
childhood, and has memories of his father's reaction to the news that
the school bus was being given a police escort. Fincher Senior
explained flatly that a killer had sent a letter to the Chronicle
threatening to shoot the tyres of the bus, and then kill the children.
In the film, Graysmith experiences a similar moment with his child
but, unlike Fincher's father, he removes him from the bus.
As nostalgia, Zodiac is compelling. Lovers of Americana will be kept
entertained by Fincher's digital rendering of 1970s San Francisco,
captured with the director's customary flair, in shots where the
camera swoops over the city with the agility of Spider-man. Those
dark, rain-washed streets are patrolled by ship-shaped Fords and
yellow cabs to a soundtrack of period pop hits. The first murder
follows the 4th of July fireworks, with a young couple spotlit by a
stranger's headlights on a lovers' lane while Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy
Man plays. "Was that your husband?" asks the boy. "No," says the girl,
seconds before the gun pokes through the passenger side window, "it's
nothing."
Fincher is a master of little feints of misplaced confidence, and the
cranking of tension is made easier by the fact that the killer's face
is never seen. The viewer knows, when the action pauses to show a taxi
driver listening to a radio discussion of the Zodiac murders, that the
man in the back of the cab is about to contribute to the debate, but
the how and the when remain the stuff of guilty pleasure. We
appreciate the naivety of the woman who pulls over on the highway when
the car behind flashes its headlights, but Fincher stretches the
moment so taut that the viewer wills a murderous conclusion.
But Zodiac isn't really a long film about killing. It is about
obsession and procedure, a talk opera in which words speak louder than
actions. Fincher's inspiration wears no disguise. The wood-panelled,
striplit office of the Chronicle, with its symphony of ringing phones
and its editorial conferences in shirtsleeves, and the fervent
click-clack of typewriters, and the reluctant double act between the
na�ve cartoonist and the hardboiled hack Paul Avery (a splendidly
boozy turn by Robert Downey Jr), and the conspiracy of cautious
officialdom, make it a sequel of sorts to All The President's Men, in
which America's innocence gets battered again.
More than murder, it is a story about storytelling. Zodiac succeeds
because he feeds the media's hunger for compelling narratives. His
murders are accompanied by coded puzzles, designed to illustrate how
much smarter he is than his pursuers, and to magnify his importance.
Fincher's film is a riddle, too, offering more clues than answers to a
case which remains unsolved. Still, the soundtrack is a help: when
Gyllenhaal - the cartoonist as Sherlock - meets the man most likely to
have been Zodiac, the radio plays Baker Street.
Labels: Film Review
posted by Alastair McKay at 7:50 PM
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