'Zodiac' : It's a long story
David Fincher is a director of estimable talents. He's technically imaginative with a great eye for detail and a feel for mood. In films like "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "Panic Room," he sets a scene, sucks you in and shows you over and over that you're in the hands of a visual master.
His abilities have often made him seem like a bit of a showoff — which is partly what makes the comparative aesthetic subtlety of "Zodiac" so striking. In telling the real-life story of a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early '70s, he makes you feel as if you're watching a film that was actually made during that time.
It's low-key, straightforward, a bit faded. No stylized tricks, nothing flashy about it.
But in toning things down, Fincher also drags them out. "Zodiac" runs an astonishing two hours and 40 minutes, and it feels like it. The director has said there was no way to make the film any shorter — that to tell this story completely, it had to be this long — and he clearly went to great lengths to get the many complicated elements just right.
But is he serious? "The Departed," which just won best picture at the Academy Awards, was two and a half hours and even that felt too long. If you're going to ask your audience to sit happily for that sort of duration, you'd better give them an absolute masterpiece of cinema.
"Zodiac" certainly has its moments, but it's no masterpiece.
It's solid for the first hour and a half: taut and tense, thrilling and often darkly funny. Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt ("Basic"), working from the true-crime best-seller by former San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith, keep you guessing and make you feel as if you're right in the thick of the chase. (And they manage the rare feat of capturing newsroom culture accurately — especially the gallows humor, a necessary defense mechanism when dealing with a horrific story.)
The film features some excellent performances from a strong cast, including Mark Ruffalo as tenacious San Francisco police Inspector David Toschi (supposedly the inspiration behind Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character) and Robert Downey Jr. as self-destructive Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, who covered the Zodiac killings. Brian Cox absolutely tears it up as celebrity defense lawyer Melvin Belli, a role any character actor would have a ball playing and one that seems ideally suited for Cox's brand of off-kilter bravado.
As the obsessed Graysmith, though, Jake Gyllenhaal is both the central figure and the weakest link. He's the one who keeps the hunt alive when there seems to be nowhere else to go with it, and even though he's not a detective or a reporter, his fascination with the serial killings instinctively propels him. But he's never fleshed out sufficiently to make you believe that he'd sacrifice his safety and that of his family to find the truth. We are told repeatedly that the former Eagle Scout is just a genuinely good guy, but that's not enough.
As the killings subside and the official investigation lags, so does the film, causing you to glance reflexively at your watch and realize, wow, there's still another entire hour left. And the ending leaves you feeling more than a bit unsatisfied. The killer was never caught; the prime suspect, a convicted child molester played eerily by the beefy John Carroll Lynch, died in 1992. And so the movie just sort of dangles out there with no sense of closure.
For a while, though, "Zodiac" buzzes with creepiness and fear. The killer methodically tracks down and takes out young people all over the Bay Area, then sends encoded letters to various newspapers, including the Chronicle, and demands that they print them in their entirety — or he'll kill again, elaborately.
Graysmith has always been curious about symbols and puzzles and insinuates himself with cops and reporters, learning what he can and trying eagerly to help. He actually shows more interest than Toschi's partner who drops out of the case (a stoic Anthony Edwards, with whom Ruffalo shares an easy banter).
But eventually, he's the only one who cares. Tracking the Zodiac killer, as he called himself, sucked the life out of nearly everyone involved. Despite its many strengths, the movie about the killer tends to have the same effect.
<B>TITLE:</B> "Zodiac"<B>CAST:</B>Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo; Chloe Sevigney, Anthony Edwards<B>DIRECTOR:</B> David Fincher<B>RATED:</B> R for strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.<B>GRADE:</B> 2½ Stars
