Revisiting Zodiac

If David Fincher's Se7en rubbed your face in the horrific machinations of a fictional serial killer, then Zodiac is an intentionally clinical examination of the search for a real one. The blood isn't splashed across the screen as liberally as in Fincher's earlier effort, nor are the shadows nearly as dark. This relative restraint gives this all-too-true story just that much more authenticity, and makes the investigation by police and amateurs alike into the mysterious Zodiac Killer's identity feel exactly like that: an investigation. This is a long, methodical movie, but between its obsession with the case details, its raising questions, answering them, and then gleefully raising more, it needs to be. It puts one of the most intoxicating mysteries ever recorded on a screen, and then only reinforces its mysteriousness.

Obviously, the Zodiac was never caught, so it's only logical that Fincher would rest the weight of the story on the journalists who tried to. This movie spans an incredible 22 years, years filled with secrets, repeated hopes that a real breakthrough had finally been made, and then devastation after yet another lead fizzles out into ash. It solves some mysteries, produces new ones that only deepen the doubt, and somehow turns a fifty-seven-year-old cold case into one of the best historical movies I've ever seen. Robert Graysmith is but a lowly cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, but there is a hook in him. He just has to know who the killer is, and it doesn't matter to him what sacrifices he'll have to make to learn the truth. 

However, life happens, and somewhere along this decades-long timeline, Graysmith got married. Now he's going to have to put up with both a wife who's unsupportive of his obsession and a bunch of kids he'll have to protect from the truth about what this unidentified killer did. Graysmith's compulsion drives this movie, and the ups and downs of his emotional state give it something Se7en didn't have: variety. Zodiac is scary. Zodiac is interesting. Zodiac can even be funny, sad, uplifting, disgusting, ethereal, and a whole other range of emotions that naturally come with the hustle and bustle of life as first a journalist and then a father. Graysmith's emotions are very often our own. 

For much of the movie, his obsession with the killer makes him and crime reporter Paul Avery natural journalistic bedfellows, and the two of them share a boozing, almost-funny alliance of convenience. Portrayed brilliantly by Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr, the two men inject the movie with a laid-back personability that makes it something Se7en wasn't: fun. This is an efficient movie, but it's most impressively so when it uses wordless visual storytelling to explore the two men. My favorite example of this is the occasionally loud-mouthed Avery ridiculing Graysmith for his silly-looking drink at a bar, only for Graysmith to give him a sip and the movie to cut to a waiter clearing half a dozen of those silly, empty glasses from their table. So many of the individual scenes in Zodiac are their own miniature movies, which can sometimes be frustrating, but looking at it through the lens of my expanding experiences, I'm realizing that was the point.

Zodiac does not move with a lot of propulsion, preferring to live in the same space as its characters. I once saw this as a lack of focus on Fincher's part, but coming back to the movie as a more experienced critic, I realize what it's trying to do. It wants to dwell on how each of our characters reacts to the killings. Sometimes, they dig around for clues. Sometimes, they buy drinks. Sometimes, they learn to shoot guns and wear lapel pins stating they are not the person the Zodiac threatened in his most recent letter. This movie chooses to live among its characters rather than just observe them.

So many scenes that are dull on the surface take a thrilling turn, playing like their own miniature movies. Zodiac is a seemingly endless stream of false victories, false defeats, and false endings, the nature of an up-and-down procedural. Avery and Graysmith are the connecting tissue holding these triumphs and disappointments together, and their lives are very important to Fincher. His command of pacing is in total control here, and I love how the time jumps in this movie turn things that could be a little tedious, like Robert getting married, into surprises when the girl he went on a first date with just a couple of scenes ago comes up and hugs her husband from behind. Obviously, this is a true story, so Fincher only has so much control over the sequence of events, but he is still completely in charge of how he portrays history, and always finds a way to make the things he can't control about this story work in the favor of the emotions he wants to capture with it. 

The life Graysmith leads looks as period-appropriate as it is relatable, and the amount of nearly invisible digital rendering required to capture a past life of the San Francisco Bay Area is astounding. Cinematographer Harris Savides paints a colorful portrait of the city, seamlessly blending in-camera images with post-production CGI. The soundtrack is equally fitting, a brilliant mixture of classic rock needle drops that rejects the stereotypically dark drone taken for granted in most thrillers. Uptempo rock songs by Donovan and Vanilla Fudge inject scenes of the Zodiac's murders with a grim irony, causing them to land with a sickening impact because they don't feel the way you expect them to. Adding to this is the fact that Fincher actually cast different people to play the barely-seen Zodiac killer for each scene, which is a smart trick that makes him seem more anonymous, as well as what I believe to be an unspoken jab at the serial killer, who wondered in his letters who would play him in a movie one day. 

Again, Zodiac spans an incredible 22 years, and during that time, Graysmith is trying to protect his growing family from his own investigation. The movie has many disparate parts, but it ties them all back to this tug-of-war between Graysmith's obsessions and his family's needs, making him a throughline slowly being pulled apart by two opposing influences. The crisis is rarely explicitly stated, but it's obvious, and one of my favorite moments in the movie features him flipping through the radio with one of his kids in the car, fruitlessly trying to find a station that isn't talking about the Zodiac until he eventually gives up and turns the radio off. Graysmith is enthusiastic about the case, maybe enthusiastic enough to risk his own family life, and while everyone else eventually moves on from the killings, he refuses to. Zodiac is one movie with two driving forces: the first is the whims of a killer, and the other is Graysmith himself.

There were many different suspects in this case, but Zodiac takes a major interest in Arthur Leigh Allen, a child molester with a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding him. Without explicitly stating it, this movie tries to make the case that Allen was the Zodiac, and I'm interested that this is the slant it chose to take. At any rate, what this decision does is make every minute Allen is on the screen brilliantly heavy. One such moment features a group of detectives pulling him aside at his job to question him. He catches onto what they're trying to do before they even come clean with him, and tells them something that made my blood run cold: I'm not the Zodiac, and if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell you. 

Zodiac is not really a horror movie, but moments like this make it uncomfortable and, at times, quite frightening. Mention the basement scene to anyone familiar with the movie, and you'll hear the same: this moment, where Graysmith is alone with a strange man in a strange basement, made the blood run ice-cold in my veins. I'll admit that much of this movie, being based on Graysmith's book and actual case files, is very procedural in nature, but good filmmaking about a serial killer eventually stumbles upon a body or two. Fincher does a great job of making the darker elements feel that much darker, whether through irony or the simple but effective introduction of something that is meant to make you afraid. Not many people have basements in California, and it's rare for a historical film to take on such strong tones of genre; there is no other based-on-a-true-story movie quite like it. 

The Zodiac Killer's reign of terror ended in 1974, when the last letter he is universally accepted as having written arrived in the San Francisco Chronicle's mailroom. People think he either died, got arrested for another unrelated crime, or simply stopped, whether out of a fear of getting caught or some other unknown anxiety or compulsion. However, this anonymity afforded him something that didn't stop: a legacy. Fincher's film doesn't glorify the killer, but it does make his crimes urgent again, and every gunshot, stab wound, and threatening word in this movie lands with an unusual agony because we know that what we are seeing on the screen actually happened. Even if it is more clinical than Se7en, this movie never fails to remind you that, in many ways, it is real.

Zodiac is not as frightening as Se7en, and it is not as unpredictable as Gone Girl or Fight Club, but it features Fincher in total command of his craft, adapting real events while only having to worry about execution. It is slower than some of his other movies, and even intentionally frustrating, but also more varied and fertile than his other works. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance wasn't nominated for an Oscar, but it should have been. This movie puts the "process" in "procedural," and though the process can be slow and tedious, Zodiac comes together like a puzzle being slowly assembled by its interesting characters, forming a picture of a mystery man that the movie seems to hope can turn a half-century-old cold case hot again. 

Zodiac - 10/10

Luke 8:16-17