Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/6/07
What
makes a director great? We can SEE the work of actors, cinematographers,
costume designers, set decorators and special effects technicians.
We can hear the words the screenwriter wrote and watch the mechanics of
their plot in motion. We can listen to the composer's music and feel
it improving or detracting from what what we see onscreen. But what
of the director? How can we really know when the most elusively Godlike
of movie craftsmen is doing their job? I suspect that at the end
of the day, it's when he or she ensures that everyone else has done theirs
to the best of their ability, resulting in the best possible movie.
David Fincher has directed six feature films: Alien 3, Se7en,
The
Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and now the historical
serial killer thriller Zodiac. I have loved each and every
one. And that is why I think Fincher is the best director working
today.
On
July 4, 1969, a young couple sitting in a parked car is approached by a
man who opens fire on them, killing one and badly wounding the other.
About a month later, three California newspapers receive letters taking
credit for this murder and two others the previous December. Each
letter contains one-third of a cryptogram which promises to identify the
killer. At the San Francisco Chronicle, these letters are of particular
interest to two men. For Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), it's his
job: he's on the crime beat. For the other, Robert Graysmith
(Jake Gyllenhaal), it's a fascinating puzzle, and the odd young cartoonist
loves puzzles. Soon enough, Police Inspectors Toschi (Mark Ruffalo)
and Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) have brought their ongoing investigation
to the Chronicle, where three days later another letter gives the killer
a name: The Zodiac. He makes diabolical threats about murderous
rampages and attacking school buses to keep getting his letters in the
papers and his demands on TV. One demand is to speak to famous attorney
Melvin Belli (Brian Cox), who begins receiving regular calls and letters
at his home.
For
ten months, The Zodiac goes on killing. After that, the letters keep
coming but the details become more vague: is he taking credit for
other people's work? Their hands tied in knots by the fact that he
commits each crime in a different county, police battle red tape as well
as a mountain of clues, witnesses and suspects, all of whom seem to be
eliminated by handwriting comparison to the Zodiac letters. One particularly
troubling suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), who seems
in every way to be the killer except that the handwriting and a single
bloody fingerprint left at one crime scene do not match. Over time,
the papers stop running the letters and the world moves on. But moving
on is not so easy for Avery, Toschi and particularly Graysmith. The
cartoonist's interest in the case becomes all-consuming, driving away his
wife (Chloe Sevigny) and threatening his sanity. Just who WAS the
Zodiac?
We
may never know, although the movie, as Graysmith did in the pair of books
upon which it's based, takes its' best guess. One of the movie's
fascinations is watching how utterly unprepared the criminal justice world
of the late 60's and early 70's was for this kind of crime. No DNA
tests, no cell phones, only one of the four investigating departments having
a “telefax” machine. The weight the investigation put on handwriting
analysis, an art upon which even the two primary experts we meet cannot
really agree, is downright terrifying.
Zodiac
is, first and foremost, a movie about investigation. It deluges us
with facts, figures, eyewitness accounts and the criminalistic sciences
of its' time. 99 times out of a hundred, particularly at a running
time a shade over 2 ½ hours, this is a recipe for boredom.
But James Vanderbilt's screenplay does an excellent job sorting it all
out, Fincher keeps the intensity level high and a first-rate cast probes
the price of getting so close both to such evil and the culture of celebrity
that would rise up around it. Robert Downey Jr. is a perfect choice
for Avery, consumed with information, fame, and drugs. He makes a
great team with Gyllenhaal, who's always at his best as smart characters
and is as quiet as Downey is flamboyant. Ruffalo (of whom I'm usually
not the biggest fan) and Edwards make a fine investigative team, Cox shines
in his few scenes as the self-aggrandizing Belli, and Carroll is supremely
spooky. The cast is filled out with excellent actors in even the
smallest roles.
In
many ways, it's not the movie you'd expect from the flamboyant and graphic
Fincher catalog, particularly given what his last run at the serial killer
genre (the classically revolting Se7en) looked like. Zodiac
is pretty much entirely straightforward and was quite successful in transporting
me to its' time period. No flashy camerawork, no innovative editing
tricks. And while the Zodiac murder scenes (all early in the movie)
are intense and scary, they aren't particularly graphic. Still, the
second attack, on a couple in a park, was so disturbingly intense I couldn't
watch it all the way through to the end. The secret is two-fold:
first, Fincher and Vanderbilt do their best to quickly establish the victims
as real, sympathetic people before their encounters with the killer, making
their fates more than just a matter of waiting for cans to be knocked down.
And reality provided extra suspense by having a fair number of Zodiac targets
survive, so you really can root for them.
Since
most of the headline-making events of the story occurred before I was born,
most of the details were new to me, which added to the story's fascination.
I'm not sure what amazed me more, that no one ever created a Zodiac Task
Force that unified all the different jurisdictions investigating, or that
the press was so naive to think writing this maniac a blank check of media
exposure would STOP him from killing people. Of course, I'm blessed
with generations of hindsight: Zodiac's ability to make the
media/murderer alliance feel new is one of its' great strengths.
Zodiac
is the first great movie of 2007. It's smart, fascinating and intense,
and the perfect way for adults who've now seen all the 2006 Oscar movies
to start their 2007 viewing. It also extends David Fincher's amazing
career-opening winning streak to six. And that kind of quality is
good enough to earn him the title of The Palace's Favorite Director. |
