Zodiac

David Fincher could potentially be considered this generation's foremost auteur of expressive, post-modern cinema. His manic, ultra-stylized visions of violence and obsession have defined a generation’s need for coolly sadistic thrillers with dark social overtones. Se7en and Fight Club can be found on just about every dorm room DVD shelf nationwide and are part of a well known canon of must-love films for current college kids and recent graduates (other features on the roster include Requiem for a Dream, Memento, and Pulp Fiction). Zodiac certainly stands beside those films in terms of overall quality, but the means of delivery has been shaken up here. Though Fincher can not help but add a few stylistic twists here and there, he keeps Zodiac mostly in the realm of plausible reality. Whereas the killer of Se7en was a surreally cruel and nearly superhuman suspect, the menace here has all the subtle nuances and imperfections of an actual killer. Zodiac clings tightly to facts, truths of honest horror that have the ability to unnerve us more than murky fictions. The most eerie image of the Zodiac killer in the film is not that of a monstrous man lurking in shadows, but that of a seemingly normal man walking across a field in broad daylight wearing a sort of silly looking disguise. Not even the most vicious imagination could match something so simple and so terrifying.

Fincher’s basic objective becomes clear as soon as we see the vintage Paramount logo at the film’s beginning; he is not interpreting the story but rather recreating it to the best of his ability. He is laying out all the details, shaping them neatly into cinematic form. Never is he more heavenly simplistic than at the moments of the murders. The filming of death in this movie is not a fast, messy blood sport for Fincher. It is a laborious exercise in perfectly depicting just how things happened. He wants every awkward pause and strange moment captured just right. In doing this, he smashes the “based on a true story” cliché that implies the audience should assume manipulation on the filmmaker’s behalf. He makes you trust his senses and his perspective. If there is manipulation, we are all too mesmerized to know the difference.

Jake Gyllenhaal excels at being both wholesome and neurotic as Robert Graysmith, an average joe cartoonist who gets an inside peek at the Zodiac case through his work with the San Francisco Chronicle and becomes infatuated with finding the killer. There he comes into contact with the lead reporter on the case, Tom Avery, (Robert Downy Jr. as the sort of unraveling addict he plays best) and the key San Francisco investigator, David Toschi, (a gruff-voiced Mark Ruffalo also in fine form). Despite being responsible for multiple murders and potentially linked to several other crimes, it was really the Zodiac’s publicity skills which made him a culturally pervasive figure. He convinced local papers to print specially encoded ciphers within their pages and made malicious threats via the American media that captivated the attention of the general public. Beginning with a letter in 1969, Zodiac made a point of keeping himself in exclusive contact with high profile media sources, making his ability to go unidentified for nearly 40 years even more creepy. No formal charges were ever filed against a suspect, but the film (adapted from the work of the real Zodiac-phile Graysmith) levels some serious accusations at a major player in the investigation.

The Zodiac saga remains a fascinating story and Fincher’s rendition (the latest of many) is as gripping and precise a telling as anyone could ever desire. It takes on the ordinariness of the tragic tale and treats it as a fact of terror rather than attempting to create a shadowy, mysterious and more salable envisioning for mass consumption. This is a man who killed for seemingly thin motivations and made a public spectacle of his massacre. Even by film’s end his psyche remains a mystery, but it could not possibly be more enthralling to speculate and ponder how such a human could have existed and witness just how he slipped through the cracks of the legal system. This is the first truly extraordinary film of 2007.

Grade: A