Crime Collection

Rating: 7/10 (28 February 2007)

To my knowledge, there have only been three music video directors in the last decade who have successfully made the transition to making interesting feature films: Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and David Fincher. The former two have since focused their features on dream worlds and bizarre comedies, with both directing Charlie Kaufman-penned films in the recent past. But Fincher has strayed from the dreamlike quality of music videos and explored the ugly underbelly of human existence with Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, and Panic Room.
Zodiac is Fincher's latest film, and it revisits the genre of one of his most popular films, Se7en: the crime drama. However, Zodiac is developed through the use of not one approach to the overworked genre, but three.
We have an expansive cast here that Fincher takes advantage of by switching the focus of his film multiple times. The story of course focuses on the real life serial killer in San Francisco who named himself Zodiac, but we see the progression of the story though different character angles.
The film jolts along its long running time by skipping chunks of time that are seemingly irrelevant to the story about the Zodiac. Here the narrative is fixed in a progressive timeline of Zodiac activity, yet the timeline is developed through the use of three connected films.
The first is the story of a newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, who receives Zodiac's first encoded letter that explains the details of his first murders. The police are vaguely involved but the paper takes it upon themselves to investigate this killer. We are given an entertaining first look at Zodiac's first string of murders.
The second is the detective story. Here are two partnered cops rabidly attempting to track down Zodiac, much like in Se7en. Yet despite their obsession over the case, he seemingly falls through their fingers multiple times. And again, in this film, from the lack of physical evidence.
The third is the noir story. Jake Gyllenhaal becomes our noir protagonist, leading us back through the multiple case files that the detectives never knew about or never clued the audience in on. He becomes, as all noir protagonists do, increasingly obsessed about the resolution of the Zodiac crimes. Noir, simply put, encompasses the genre where the protagonist is thrown into an unusual situation and must sort his way out. And the audience simply follows the protagonist through all his breakthroughs and breakdowns.
What's interesting in Zodiac is not the individual parts of the film, but the film in its entirety. The seamless way that Fincher transitions between the three narrative styles, creating a complete film greater than the sum of its parts. And we have our narrative connections through plot cohesion and repetitive characters common in each piece: mainly Robert Downey Jr. and Elias Koteas.
And Fincher's not stupid. He realizes the potential of using both actors, mainly Downey, as anchors in time progression. Their characters bend to fit the narrative style, creating layers of genre characters within one character developed through the passing of time. And even more interesting in differentiating the narratives is the use of different actors to play Zodiac for each different story. You can never see their faces but their appearance and voice are slightly different, marking both the change in narrative and in plot where later, Zodiac's claimed murders cannot be directly linked to just one man.
My only detraction from Zodiac would be the obvious lack of Fincher's visual style from his previous films. We're missing the roaming CG shots and crispness from both Fight Club and Panic Room, but his excellent use of dark lighting, thankfully, is still present. And he does manage to create one of the most entertaining and shortest 2 hour and 40 minute films in its place, which is a high honor for a film within the hackneyed genre of the crime drama.