THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO LOSE YOUR LIFE TO A KILLER.

When David Fincher grew up in California, the killer known as the Zodiac was very real. Decades later when Fincher read James Vanderbilt’s screenplay he realized that he had been given the opportunity to make a film in the vein of All the President’s Men (1976). The studio bosses were nervous because they hired Fincher hoping he’d deliver another Se7en (1995). But the final results lacked the visual tricks from that movie; it also featured endless dialogue and very little blood. The box-office take was quite disappointing, but Warner and Paramount should be happy with one thing – Fincher has given them a film they should be damned proud of, one that will stand the test of time. 

Beginning in 1969
No, this is not another Se7en. The director instead opted for a 1970s-style documentary look that would please Alan J. Pakula, crafting an ambitious and detailed portrait of the reporters and the cops who worked on the case. The film begins on July 4th, 1969. A couple has parked at a lovers’ lane in Vallejo and is attacked by a man who shoots them both. The woman dies, but the man survives. A month later, the San Francisco Chronicle receives a letter from a man who claims to be the shooter of the couple as well as responsible for a double murder last Christmas where another young man and woman were shot to death. The letter also contains a cipher.

In future letters, the killer nicknames himself “the Zodiac” and keeps taunting the police as he attacks a third couple on the shores of Lake Berryessa (wearing a black hood and a device with a cross-circle symbol on it), stabbing the woman to death and seriously injuring the man. The last person to die at the hands of the Zodiac is a cab driver in October 1969; the killer latterly mailed pieces of his bloody shirt to the paper. 

Becoming a white whale
In his script, Vanderbilt shows how the killer frightened Northern California by making constant, hollow threats in his letters to various papers, threatening for instance to shoot children coming out of school buses. The Zodiac was indeed a liar, a person who committed few murders but knew how to cheat the police; he must have been pleased to see himself turn into a bogeyman people could blame for all kinds of things. A fascinating figure to some people, and Vanderbilt focuses on how he became a white whale to men who ruined their lives trying to figure out his identity.

At the center of it are Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) who becomes completely mesmerized by the mystery, almost losing his family in the process; reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) who’s nursing an unhealthy drinking habit and makes a personal enemy out of the Zodiac after calling him a “latent homosexual” in an article; and detective David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) who keeps chasing the killer but gets himself fired and even accused of writing some of the letters himself.

There is so much frustration in all of this; every time a solution seems imminent there’s always something that comes up short. The handwriting doesn’t fit, or the fingerprints. The movie presents the likely identity of the killer… but there’s plenty of evidence suggesting he didn’t do it. Director Fincher is brave enough to end the film in an open way. The Zodiac remains an enigma and the film doesn’t need to wrap things up too neatly. 

The acting is superb on every level. Zodiac has been accused of being too long, slow and unimaginative in its narration. Nonsense. This is as good as it gets. This is David Fincher maturing into a serious filmmaker. This is utterly believable, and thus in a way even scarier than Se7en.

Zodiac 2007-U.S. 156 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by James Vanderbilt, Mike Medavoy, Arnold Messer, Ceán Chaffin, Brad Fischer. Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay: James Vanderbilt. Books: Robert Graysmith. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (David Toschi), Robert Downey, Jr. (Paul Avery), Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox, Chloë Sevigny… Dermot Mulroney.

Trivia: Gary Oldman was reportedly considered for the part that Cox came to play. The story was previously told in The Zodiac Killer (1971), The Zodiac (2006) and the 1996 TV movie The Limbic Region.

Last word: “I don’t respect movies that treat me like I don’t have the attention span or mental faculty to follow… […] I wanted the movie to take its toll on the audience, I wanted the audience to feel like they went through it, like they went through the ringer with these guys, and I didn’t know how to do that because these guys didn’t run across rooftops and fall off fire escapes. In their quest to bring the Zodiac to justice they followed the trail of breadcrumbs as far as it would take them, and they kept pushing and kept pushing when there were crackpots coming out of the woodwork. I felt like I didn’t want to make one of those movies where you do montage/montage/montage and you get the idea that they went to the mat with this, that it took its toll – I wanted the audience to feel that.” (Fincher, Chud)

IMDb