As a white male, age 18 to 49, I’m required to watch and enjoy director David Fincher jerk the marionette strings of his characters as he maneuvers them onto paths trapped with danger and despair. To a certain degree. I find Fight Club and Seven entertaining and I own both as deluxe dual-DVD box sets, but I wouldn’t rank either among the top-40 films of all time, as the mouth-breathers on IMDb.com have.
Like those films, there’s disturbing violence in Fincher’s newest, Zodiac. It’s a movie about a real-life serial killer, after all. Zodiac’s murders both attempted and successful are depicted as swift, brutal and unexpected, strung with tension until their resolution. Despite what the film’s trailer implies, these assorted scares, shootings and stabbings are but punctuation in a movie long on deskwork and desperation: this is more a gather-the-facts potboiler like All the President’s Men than a traditional action-thriller.
San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) obsesses over the case. He solves ciphers, tracks clues, follows up on leads that turn into dead ends and posits wild-eyed theories. He pesters the cops on the case (Mark Ruffalo and a toupeed Anthony Edwards) who are bogged by overwork, politics and jurisdictional bickering. He also does a lot of hovering around the desk of the paper’s addled crime writer, Paul Avery (a funny Robert Downey Jr.). The case swallows Graysmith’s life, marriage and job. As in real life, the identity of Zodiac is suspected but no one’s ever charged or caught. It’s a bit of a slog to sit through and though the movie is paced briskly for its more than 2.5-hour length, it’s hard work with little payoff for both the audience and the characters.
Kudos to Fincher for crafting his usual dark and rich obsessive-to-detail vision. In Zodiac he captures seemingly every object from the ‘70s, from the rotary phones to the cigarette machines, and fleeting touches I remember from my own childhood in that decade, like a View-Master and a commercial for the Slinky. There are also some nice touches of trademark Fincheriffic computer-enhanced scenes as when he depicts Graysmith envisioning giant hovering versions of Zodiac’s ciphers superimposed over the Chronicle newsroom during a long tracking shot (which is actually just like the shot in Fight Club when Edward Norton imagines his apartment as the pages of an Ikea-like catalog, product names and descriptions suspended over the furniture). And when Fincher flashes forward from ‘69 to the early ‘70s, he does so with a fast-forward speed CG clip of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid being built. Clever.