Film Review: Zodiac

This one's a little older, but, I think, a little better.

And I thought it couldn’t be done. If you’d asked me last week, I would have told you there’s no way to make a boring movie about one of the most notorious unsolved serial killer cases in U.S. history. But I would have been wrong; Zodiac is a major disappointment.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a serial killer crisscrossed California. He killed or maimed random victims, primarily teenagers parked in lovers’ lanes. But his real obsession was fame. The killer, who styled himself “Zodiac,” called police to report his murders and began sending letters and puzzles to major newspapers. Largely because of this successful public relations campaign, California took notice. Fear gripped the Bay area for nearly a decade, and the local police departments were made fools of as time ticked by and the killer wasn’t caught.

Zodiac is based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith, formerly a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. As his newspaper is the recipient of several missives and cryptograms from the killer, Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets to know the case intimately. Meanwhile, Inspectors David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) track down leads and several times seem to get close to solving the case, but are ultimately frustrated.

Zodiac is the long-awaited return of director David Fincher, whose most famous picture to date is Fight Club. He uses the same clipped direction and cool visual effects in Zodiac, but that’s where the similarities end. Unlike Fight Club, which is taut, clean, and suspenseful, Zodiac meanders. Subplots are brought up but never resolved. Characters are introduced for no apparent reason. One wonders whether Fincher ever watched his final cut.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who is a very competent actor, is hopelessly miscast as Graysmith. He is at least ten years too young for the part, and looks five years younger than he actually is. And, inexplicably, he spends the entire movie sporting a 2007 haircut and 1994 clothes.

During the second act of the movie, the filmmakers seem to forget about Graysmith. The action focuses on Toschi and Armstrong’s investigation. Did Gyllenhaal go on vacation? If so, would that he had stayed away. This part of the film is far more interesting than the scenes that focus on Graysmith’s fruitless obsession with Zodiac.

One of the most egregious problems with Zodiac is that we never identify with the victims. We are introduced to them only very briefly, and they come across as strange and unlikable. The young lovers seem not to particularly like each other. The audience doesn’t feel the victims’ panic and terror, which would have added a spark of humanity to an otherwise cold film. But everything about Zodiac is conducted at arm’s length.

When someone announces they’re going to make a film about an unsolved case, the natural question to ask is, “How will it end?” The answer, in this instance, is, “With a whimper.” When the Zodiac case goes cold, Graysmith’s obsession with it increases, to the detriment of his personal life. But it’s too late. The audience doesn’t really know Graysmith and has no reason to care about him. The final third of the film focuses on his personal investigation, which at some point turns into research for a nonfiction book. Watching someone conduct research for a book—now there’s fodder for absorbing cinema!

Ultimately, Zodiac is disappointing because it could have been so good. Mark Ruffalo gives a nuanced, quirky performance, as do Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery, the Chronicle’s lead crime reporter, and Brian Cox as Melvin Belli, an attorney who accidentally gets drawn into the case. It’s also nice to see the talented Anthony Edwards again.

Zodiac has good dialogue and great music, and its subject matter has fascinated people for nearly 40 years. But it lacks cohesiveness and, like so many movies today, is far too long. Fincher missed out on an opportunity to make a timeless thriller that captures the terror of a city held at gunpoint by a madman. Instead, he made a dull procedural about cops and newsmen who, at the end of the day, failed to get their man.