Zodiac

And who better for the job than the brilliant, driven David Fincher, a director known to put his actors through more than 100 takes to get the nuances he wants. He raised the bar on kinky freaks in Se7en, plumbed the roots of trickery in The Game, tracked delusion to its core in Fight Club and used a prowling camera to dig out psychological truth in Panic Room. Zodiac, the name of the psycho who started terrorizing the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 and tormented the press with coded messages, is right up the director's dark alley. Fincher was seven and living in the kill zone when his dad told him that the Zodiac had threatened to shoot kids like him as they stepped off their school bus.

It's a wonder Fincher wasn't traumatized by this nut job, who inspired the fictional killer Scorpio in Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Primal fear is hard to explain away, but the characters in Fincher's film try to do just that by cutting a monster down to human size. At the head of the list is cartoonist Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal with just the right blend of smarts and geek-boy fixation. Graysmith, a shy newbie at The San Francisco Chronicle, is gripped by the first letter, which begins, "This is the Zodiac speaking." For more details, he hounds the paper's ace crime reporter, Paul Avery (the reliably amazing Robert Downey Jr.), who in turn hounds the SFPD's hotshot homicide inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner, William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). The contentious bond among these men will stretch into years, even when Armstrong drops out and no arrests are made. It's Graysmith who will later write the two books, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked, that serve as the film's source material, bolstered by fresh investigations launched by Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt.

That's a lot of dogs to be gnawing on one bone. But make no mistake, you will be hooked and creeped out big time. Fincher stages the first murder with blood-chilling intensity. A hooded killer walks up to a car parked on a lovers' lane and opens fire on a teen couple (he survives, she doesn't). It could be the stuff of a typical CSI episode -- violent porn sandwiched between commercials. But Fincher transcends exploitation. We feel the swiftness of the crime, the shock of what follows and the reeling sense of life snuffed out in seconds.

Later, in one of the most realistic and wrenching depictions of murder in broad daylight, the Zodiac stalks a couple picnicking by a lake in Napa. Their serenity is interrupted when the Zodiac is suddenly on them with a knife, stabbing them repeatedly. Fincher lingers on the aftermath, of being left, crying for help, to bleed to death. These sequences, including the execution of a cab driver on a suburban street, are paralyzing in their brutal immediacy. They need to be. It's the human toll taken by the Zodiac, who sparked copycat crimes across the country, that drives the protagonists to keep hammering at this cold case even when the killings stop and media interest wanes.

Fincher never sensationalizes these images. For the first time in his career, he's dealing with real people and granting them a respect denied by tabloids and Zodiac's attempts to hype himself into a media headline. He achieves a near-documentary realism enhanced by high-definition camerawork from the gifted Harris Savides (Elephant, Gerry) that brings a gritty urgency to everything from the offices of cops and reporters to the streets where the crimes were actually committed. The film calls to mind two 1970s classics, Francis Coppola's The Conversation and Alan Pakula's All the President's Men, in its evocation of time and place, with added resonance from the striking music by David Shire, who scored both of those films. Fincher's shrewd use of songs to bridge time finds a nerve-jangling menace in Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" with its intimations of "unenlightened shadows cast."

Still, it's the people in those shadows who draw you in. Gyllenhaal pulls us inexorably into a mind-set that ultimately wrecks Graysmith's marriage to Melanie (Chloe Sevigny). And Ruffalo is outstanding at showing us a battered Toschi -- once enough of a supercop to be the model for Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Michael Douglas on TV's The Streets of San Francisco -- demoted out of homicide but still willing to assist Graysmith on his quest. The most dramatic decline is experienced by Avery, whose addiction to the case is trumped by his self-destructive jones for booze and cocaine. Downey gives a blazing performance that runs the gamut from humor to heartbreak. All the actors excel. Brian Cox is sharply funny as celeb lawyer Melvin Belli, and John Carroll Lynch will haunt your nightmares as Arthur Leigh Allen, the suspect the cops dismiss and Graysmith comes to focus on.

Put your whodunit expectations away when you visit Zodiac. It's the process that pins you to your seat. A film this painstaking and tenacious won't appeal to those in it strictly for the blood lust. Fincher is a powerhouse filmmaker, but he doesn't pander. He shakes you up in ways you don't see coming. Thanks to him, the still-new movie year, littered with barf-inducing Hollywood formula (hello, Norbit), has busted out with something unique and unmissable.

Share

• Email
• Stumble
• AIM
• Del.icio.us
• DiggThis
• Fark It!

PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Feb 28, 2007)