Killing Me Slowly: Zodiac

Around the 2-and-a-half hour mark of David Fincher’s crime movie Zodiac, there are two scenes in which police officers tell Jake Gyllenhaal, “Okay, you’ve got five minutesâ€Â to interview a witness, or sift through cold-case files, or look dreamily at someone with his big eyes, or whatever it is he’s planning to do. Exhausted and slumped over in my seat in the crowded theater, I dimly imagined some higher-up a Paramount giving Fincher a similar talk. “The picture sounds good, kid,â€Â the exec says. “But you’ve only got ninety minutes.â€Â Would that were the case. As it is, Zodiac pushes three hours, and in doing so, becomes one of the least thrilling thrillers I can recall. The film traces the Zodiac murders, a series of unsolved killings that haunted California from the late 60s through the early ‘70s, and the three men who spent over twenty years working on the case. The movie focuses on Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who idolizesâ€Â"and eventually finds himself the unlikely partner ofâ€Â"the paper’s flamboyant star investigative reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.). All the while the police are on the case too, led by detective David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), a man so tough, the movie notes, that he taught Steve McQueen how to hold his gun for his role in Bullitt. At the start of the film, the killer dispatches a young couple, and sends a confession and a note in code to the newspaper, allowing everyone to promptly get to business. The reporters investigate the killings. The detectives investigate the killings. Sometimes they disagree, sometimes they don’t. There are promising leads, unpromising leads, false leads, good leads, bad leads, weird leads, scary leadsâ€Â"well, there are a lot of leads. Zodiac posits that perhaps the killer would have been brought to justice had so much information not fallen through the police departments’ bottlenecked bureaucracies. If only David Fincher had been in charge! Not the smallest detail gets by him, and he shares it all with the viewer. It’s enough to drive anyone insane, and it does. Avery sinks into Aquarian drug addiction and alcoholism and eventually loses his job at the newspaper. Toschi tries to keep a professional face on the whole thing, but it eats him up inside. And Graysmith just goes off the deep end, alienating his wife and children, and turning his apartment into a depository of information on the killer every bit as creepy as the murders themselves. Downey and Ruffalo give their roles the thorough treatment over that one should expect from two fine actors. Downey’s Avery is a comic but magnetic peacock, the inverse of Ruffalo’s understated but tortured Toschi. Set against these performances, Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith is a surprising disappointment. His cartoonist-cum-boy-detective is all hunched shoulder and nervous ticks, failing to look or sound as weary as we’re told he is. He is an eternal innocent, even as he becomes obsessed with starting into the face of evil. But Zodiac’s biggest disappointment is its wealth of missed opportunities. What rich material the director was presented with: a heart of darkness on the loose in the epicenter of California’s bright social revolutions; a publicity-hungry serial killer who communicates in code; three men driven to alcohol, professional duress, and insanity by a case that won’t close. When explored thoroughly, any one of these elements would make for a fascinating movie. What we get instead are superficial nods to these themes: a derogatory mention of hippies from an uptight caller on a radio show, a semiological explanation of the Zodiac code instead of a psychological exploration of what led him to kill, and endless footage of Toschi’s and Graysmith’s wives begging them to come back to bed, dear. The film begs comparison to Spike Lee’s excellent Summer of Sam, another story of murder and insanity in the ‘70s. But where Lee’s film dives into the links between the chaos in the mind of the killer to the social chaos period, Fincher’s movie makes no attempt at any broader cultural statements. These oversights are surprising in a film that is otherwise very carefully made. The sights and sounds of the film serve up an incredibly complete recreation of the time. Not just clothes and hairstyles (any movie with Mark Ruffalo is bound to feature at least one Oscar-worthy hair performance), but minutiae make the setting real. Even the office noisesâ€Â"typewriters and the analog jangle of old telephonesâ€Â"add to the effect. Like he did in Se7en and Fight Club, Fincher proves that he can make an repulsive scene of violence watchable by making it visually fascinating. Set against the dullness of the office, the cinematography in the killing scenes are the most pleasing ones in the entire movie: they are moments of extreme lucidity in a film where nothing else is clear. These scenes recalled both the soft, beautiful light of a Vermeer and the hard lines and off-center composition of a Hopper. This is an inspired visual twist: accessing a creepy and compelling middle ground between two very different artists to speak to the incongruity of random and hideous killings in lovely California. There’s no doubt then that Fincher knows what he’s doing. But as the movie illustrates, even the most skilled practitioner of his craft can stumble without focus. I look forward to his next movie, but until then, I hope someone at the studio can find five minutes to talk to him about the editing process.