Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Killing
Time
(Zodiac, 3/12/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Did
serial killers exist before there were mass media? It seems safe to
assume they did, but didn't toiling in obscurity make their work a lot
less rewarding? As it is, the cursus honorum of the typical serial
killer is pretty predictable: first the feeding frenzy in the print
media, then the made-for-TV features like Frontline or 20/20,
followed by the bestselling books. The process is topped off by the
crowning symbol of cultural relevance—a feature film.
With David (Panic Room, Fight
Club) Fincher's Zodiac, the killer who terrorized California
in the 1960's and '70's finally gets his big-screen treatment. Based
on the 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, the film covers the Zodiac's career
over a span of twenty years, from its beginning in a series of motiveless
gun and knife attacks of victims in remote places, to his murder of
a cabbie in downtown San Francisco, to its fadeout into the general
background of homicidal violence in America. The Zodiac was notable
for his deft exploitation of the media. Because he trolled the newspapers
for murders he could take credit for, no one is sure of the true number
of his victims. Officially, he remains unidentified—though in his
book Graysmith apparently makes a strong case against one suspect.
Fincher is an apt choice to tell
this story. After learning his craft making music videos, he made the
surprisingly effective, completely creepy Seven, which in retrospect
seems inspired by the Zodiac. Where Seven was luridly fascinating,
like moving your refrigerator to check out what's growing underneath,
Zodiac is restrained, almost reverential. Everyone is calling
it a "police procedural", but it's as much a "press procedural"
as well, as we watch a circle of editors and reporters at the San
Francisco Chronicle cope with the Zodiac's demands for attention.
The case leads one veteran reporter (Robert Downey, Jr.) to burn all
his professional bridges in search of a reportial edge; the puzzle-obsessed
cartoonist Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes even farther, risking his
family to find the truth.
That Zodiac still fails to
be involving has nothing to do with the actors. Downey and Gyllenhaal
are committed and convincing, and Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards seem
authentic—if not very characterized—as the flummoxed detectives
on the case. The services of Chloe Sevigny, on the other hand, are wasted
on a role that requires nothing more than to give reproving looks.
The script by James Vanderbilt has
an intriguing structure, reading like a procedural followed by a deconstruction
of a procedural as Graysmith works to correct the cops' oversights.
Fincher's direction keeps up a fair amount of tension throughout. Mystery
buffs—or anybody who likes CSI or Law & Order SVU
or any of those other acronymic cop dramas—are likely to devour
this stuff.
The film's biggest problem is that
two hours and forty minutes is just too long a way to go for a story
with no resolution. It would not be spoiling the end of Zodiac
to note that it has none of the punch of Seven. There's too much
marking time with temporal ellipses ("two months later…",
"four years later…") that provide opportunities for updated
hair and costumes but little clarity. This reviewer found himself looking
frequently at his watch; twenty minutes later, he would look at it again.
A good movie about a killer shouldn't feel like killing time.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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