Prior to finally sitting down to write this very review, I had decided that I was not clever enough to write about (in any useful fashion, at least) David Fincher’s Zodiac, an astonishing film that exactingly recreates the events that ensued after a killer who deemed himself the Zodiac began to terrorize the San Francisco Bay Area.
After an opening stunner chillingly cataloguing one of the killer’s crimes, set to the tune of Donovan’s unforgettable psychedelic anthem “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” Fincher leads his audience down the halls of the San Francisco Chronicle on the day the first of the Zodiac’s letters was received, wherein he asks the editor to publish a cipher containing his identity. This catches the attention of cartoonist Robert Graysmith—brilliantly played here by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor I’ve never respected much in the past, but that here shows nothing less than prodigious talent. Graysmith starts snooping around, trying to get whatever evidence he can from the writer assigned to the story, the flamboyant Paul Avery, embodied by no less than Robert Downey Jr., who, for my money, delivers the best performance in a film that has plenty to go around.
Shortly thereafter, we’re also taken to the police investigation, where we spent a great deal of the time following detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, great as always) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards, giving a wonderfully restrained performance) as they follow false leads and are engulfed in mountains of evidence that lead them nowhere. It’s one of Zodiac’s (and Fincher’s) greatest accomplishments that from the moment we begin getting a sense of the killer’s aims, the very journey to catch him becomes every bit as important as whether or not he’s ever actually caught, which will have to suffice in a film that offers no real closure.
Zodiac's 158-minute running time feels shorter than anything playing at the cineplex, given the amount of information Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have been able to pack into their film with such economy. Along with the aforementioned actors, John Carroll Lynch, Chloe Sevigny, Brian Cox, and Phillip Baker Hall also deliver magnificent supporting performances.
Simply the most elegant narrative in I don’t know how many years, Zodiac is a wonderful reminder of a different kind of Hollywood film; the ones that were made in the 1970s by directors unafraid to explore their personal visions on the screen as vividly and beautifully as possible, and this movie—Fincher’s masterpiece—does not pale in comparison to the best of Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, or Martin Scorsese, which, in a time when most films are tailor-made for a hyperactive audience raised on YouTube, is no small feat for a film as meticulous and methodical as Zodiac.
