The evening of July 4, 1969. Two Northern California teens at a mountaintop make-out spot get interrupted by a gunman, whose attack leaves the girl dead and the boy barely breathing. The murderer tauntingly phones in his kill and sends a cryptic letter to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. “This is the Zodiac speaking,” he writes, promising to continue his “kill rampage” if his words aren’t printed in the newspaper’s afternoon edition.He did kill again. Director David Fincher’s “Zodiac” details the decades-long manhunt that, to this day, hasn’t yielded the murderer’s arrest.
Hotshot reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) rides the killing streak to front page glory, as does homicide detective David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the real-life inspiration for Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt.” Both men got closer to the investigation than anyone else, and both were ultimately destroyed by it. Toschi stayed on the case for a decade, ultimately getting kicked out of his division for sending fake fan letters to himself. Avery ended his life muttering to himself, strung out on cocaine and strapped to an oxygen tank.
That was the nature of the Zodiac case, a vortex of theories, blind alleys, ciphers, patterns, literary allusions and a shaky voice on a call-in television show. His identity never came into clearer focus. Witnesses recalled a stocky, average-looking white male with a crew cut. The blanks broaden with empty anecdotes about overheard names and men who acted “weird” on one occasion or other. This anonymity made Zodiac a shifting, faceless, yet somehow breathing, palpable evil in people’s minds.
At the sidelines of the Zodiac coverage from the beginning, Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) resuscitated the case when others had declared it dead. His dedicated interest in solving puzzles, however, soon gave way to obsession, with the increasingly desperate reporter banging on doors late at night, wild-eyed and adamant, whenever a new bit of evidence fell into his lap.
James Vanderbilt’s subtle, rich screenplay, based on Graysmith’s true crime novel of the same name, distills mountains of facts and dead ends into a sharply focused narrative, with no unnecessary oomph. Many scenes simply focus on men sitting in offices scratching their heads, theorizing and speaking about actions they’ve yet to take, bogged down by a purposefully draining and infuriating level of minutiae.
Fincher is a proven hand at dark material (“Seven,” “Fight Club”), but he has never exhibited as much restraint in his execution. The violence in the film is sudden and brutal but never sensational; Fincher seems more preoccupied with the violence of ideas. He uses quick shifts of location and jumps forward in time to create a sense of sleepless, steamrolling dread, evoking the numbness of a gripping chase that never ends.
The director embraces a coolly detached, near-documentary style that plops viewers immediately into a time and place, only gradually shading in the personalities of the story’s protagonists. The camera is a steady, nonjudgmental observer, often taking a god’s-eye view of the action, comprehensive but distant. “Zodiac” has the vibe of a ’70s paranoid thriller a la “All the President’s Men” and “The Parallax View,” which Fincher acknowledges with the inclusion of vintage Paramount and Warner Bros. logos during the opening credits.
Rock singer Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” bookends the film, chillingly appropriate in its cyclical, droning melody and vaguely sinister lyrics about “the crying of humanity” squelched by a man “singing songs of love.” Fincher suggests a world in which life still whizzes by in all directions, but that still has black, hidden corners where unspeakable madness and evil lurk and can emerge from without warning.
The Zodiac investigation becomes a media circus, but who is controlling the flow of information to the public? The killer himself is deciding what news gets printed with every new bullet fired and flourish of pen. He begins claiming ownership of murders that aren’t even his just to get more attention, but are the reporters and policemen assigned to him doing the same? Eventually, Fincher asserts, the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the American psyche ensures that it all becomes yesterday’s news soon enough.
This is a film aware of the way that movies and pop culture work their way into history and public consciousness and can even change the shape of those realities. Toschi has already had a film made about him, and Zodiac gets one, too, with “Dirty Harry.” Just by their existence, those films have added wrinkles to the overall story of the Zodiac killings, as has this new film. Fincher quietly blows the mind with ripples like this one that stretch out into a seemingly answerless infinity.
The Zodiac killer may still be at large as you read this. He may have been a combination of several killers, an unholy amalgam of madmen, copycats and wannabes. He may be dead. He may be the man who delivers your mail. “Zodiac” bottles such paranoia and makes it stick with you. It makes you want to start thumbing through a copy of Graysmith’s novel, diving into more blood-soaked details, plumbing even further depths of what you already know to be a bottomless mystery.
ZODIAC
Paramount Pictures
Rated R
STARRING:
Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.
THE VERDICT:
David Fincher’s profile of the people involved in the search for the Zodiac killer reveals much about serial killers and pop mentality.
3.5/4 stars