Zodiac
"Zodiac" is as meticulous and absorbing as David Fincher's other thrillers. In "The Game, " "Fight Club, " and "Panic Room, " he placed a premium on painstaking craftsmanship that made them easy to get lost in. Even though none of those movies was as distinctly satisfying as his music videos, the sensibility seemed completely new. He was a pop artist and a mechanical engineer, and the movies were an impossible combination of the two: laborious fun.
But "Zodiac," based on James Vanderbilt's deftly structured screenplay, is a long work of completely sustained suspense and dark humor. The film reconstructs the still-unsolved, nearly 40-year-old case of the so-called Zodiac murders, which gripped the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It isn't concerned with the solution of the case so much as how the search for a solution undid the men trying to do the solving.
The hunt begins after the killer, who has been at large for several months, writes to the San Francisco Chronicle, demanding the editors publish his letter and the accompanying cryptogram. ( It's the first of several.) The editors hold long meetings over whether to run the puzzle and it's a heady kick watching anonymous, middle-aged white guys sitting around a conference room talking ethics in a Hollywood movie. The puzzle is printed, and, in a flurry of scenes, everyone from the CIA to a married couple in Salinas tries to decipher it.
This isn't Watergate but in many respects the movie feels like "All the President's Men." Here, our Woodward and Bernstein are actually a composite of problem-solver types. Robert Downey Jr. plays Paul Avery , one of the paper's more flamboyant staffers (those ascots, those vests, that facial topiary). Avery was a star crime reporter, and he seems as driven and self-involved as the famous
His co-worker at the Chronicle, the editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith, is more durable. Graysmith, a divorced single dad, a word freak, and an Eagle Scout, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. As the years roll by and the case goes uncracked, no one, not even the blind date (Chloë Sevigny) he eventually marries, bothers to tell the increasingly obsessed Gray-smith that there's no merit badge for sleuthing. (Graysmith wrote the book from which this movie was adapted; his subsequent book about the dead "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane was turned into Paul Schrader's movie "Auto Focus." The Eagle Scout is into serious kink.)
Gyllenhaall, of course, doesn't suggest Graysmith is a fetishist. It's just all-consuming work. The actor's pop-eyed boyishness has never been better used. He's like a Hardy brother with no idea what his Scout's instincts have gotten him into.
Graysmith and Avery often butt heads with David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), one of the detectives on the case. For a change, Ruffalo actually appears to be up to something. He's put a lot of air in his voice, but when he speaks, it's directly, without the actor's usual tics and stammers. In other words, it's believable that Ruffalo's cop could have shown Steve McQueen how to be a detective in "Bullitt," as Toschi did in real life.
Over 2 1/2 hours, the movie divides its time among the cartoonist, the reporter, the detectives, the killings, and the manhunt. Abetting the chase are a troupe of solid actors doing starchy law enforcement (Anthony Edwards, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney, Donal Logue), some comic insinuation from the excellent character actor John Carroll Lynch, and a delicious performance from Brian Cox as the pompous King of Torts, Melvin Belli, who relishes the opportunity to talk to Zodiac on live television.
Breaks in the case come and go, and the years fall away. As big and wide as the movie's scope seems, "Zodiac" is actually pretty myopic. The time line stretches from 1969 to 1991, but we don't see or hear much about Vietnam, Watergate, disco, the Harvey Milk assassination, or the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other than footage of the construction of the Transamerica Tower, it's all Zodiac all the time.
It's true that the inconclusiveness of the case keeps the movie from achieving any sort of finality. Even at 160-odd minutes, it feels incomplete, insofar as it has to acknowledge that it's pulled us across time only to shrug. Nonetheless, this is a stylistic turning point for the director. His typically grandiose filmmaking is introverted, patient, chillingly calm, and sure of itself. Every shot has the deep matte texture that good digital filmmaking provides. The inventive cinematographer Harris Savides uses breathtakingly wide angles and intelligent contrasts of shadow and light to create an intense painterliness. (The lonely nightlife in Edward Hopper works comes to mind.)
May everyone who plans on making "Saw 12" watch the gut-wrenching murder sequences in "Zodiac" and appreciate the astonishing, unalloyed clarity of the filmmaking. These same young directors were presumably also weaned on Fincher's "Se7en," that chicly apocalyptic serial killer flick that birthed a generation of amoral and visionless imitators. With that movie in mind, people were remaking filthy horror classics of the 1970s to resemble the fashionable distress of Fincher's thriller.
"Zodiac" is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes. "He doesn't break cases," it reads. "He smashes them." The irony is piquantly funny. The Zodiac case smashes just about every man who tries to break it.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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