Mind-wrapping murder mystery that goes beyond thrills

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2009)

If books, movies and television have warped our minds in any way, one way is that we crave this cathartic clarity at the end of every mystery story we consume. We have to know who dunnit or we go berserk and these media have taken our natural instinct and turned it into our expectation. One would suppose that "Zodiac," a murder mystery based on the real, infamous killings of the late 60s and 70s in the San Francisco area, is one of those films, and in many ways it is--but it's something more. "Zodiac" is not so much a film about solving a mystery as it is about the obsession that fuels it.
David Fincher, who directed perhaps the greatest murder mystery of the 90s in "Se7en," returns to the genre again to direct the more biographical and fact-based "Zodiac." With Fincher's expertise, Zodiac becomes a mystery that sucks in all your attention, building suspense and--more importantly--your mental and emotional investment. Like Fincher's previous work, the cinematography is strong, (he collaborates with Harris Savides once again from 1997's "The Game") the lighting and shadows helping to build the mystery shrouding your every thought.
Basically, the story is so thoroughly told, with no detail in the case spared, that you become obsessed. Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal), the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist that took it upon himself to pursue the case when the leads fizzled out, is a victim of that very obsession, and therein is why this is a very good film. The main character and the viewers are completely in sync--we identify so easily with him, feeling all his frustrations, watching his family life start to crumble away.
Sometimes, this amped up perplexity for the purpose of creating the viewer's own obsession, does sacrifice the film's other elements. There's only so close we can get to the characters (all who are played very well), like Robert Downey Jr.'s Tim Avery, drug-abusing Chronicle reporter, or Mark Ruffalo as police detective David Toschi. With our brains so focused on the mystery, part of the human element of this film is lost. These were real people and the victims of these crimes were actually victims. But such is Hollywood, and the mystery elements are a precedent for marketing the film. At least Fincher doesn't let them completely dominate, awakening us to our dangerous obsession of mystery-solving.