Smart Killer, dumb cops

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2007)

In this part of the world "Zodiac" conjures up memories of the old Ford model Dad drove in the 1950s, but in the Bay area of San Francisco, it is still a name to send a shiver down your spine. The Zodiac was a serial killer of the 1960s and 1970s who specialised in attacking courting couples and sending cryptic (and not so cryptic) notes to the local newspapers. He was never caught, despite two of his victims surviving to identify suspects and despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against one particular suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen.
This film, based on Robert Graysmith's books, is a combination of the police procedural with newsroom drama a la "All the President's Men". The police efforts to find the killer, led by Detective Toschi (an excellent Mark Ruffalo) are complemented firstly by the San Francisco Chronicle's Paul Meyer (Robert Downey, cast yet again as a talented drunk) and then by the paper's cartoonist, Robert Graysmith, who becomes more and more obsessed by the case. Graysmith, also excellently played by Jake Gyllenhaal, eventually persuades Toschi to re-examine the evidence.
As the tagline rightly has it, the film is about the effect the Zodiac had on his pursuers as well as on the crimes and the investigation. Chasing the Zodiac was not a great career move for Toschi, Meyer and Graysmith. Nor was it good for Meyer's health or Graysmith's personal life. But the main focus is on the hunt, and it's a long and tangled tale. The police were almost unbelievably incompetent, though this is rather soft-pedalled in the film. For further reading on this see the chapter "This is the Zodiac Speaking" in Richard Belfield's "Can You Crack the Enigma Code" (2006).
However it is made clear in the film that the several police forces involved routinely kept pertinent information to themselves instead of sharing it. Graysmith comes up with a prime suspect, Allen (spookily played by John Carroll Lynch),
From the little I know about this case, the director has exercised some dramatic licence  this is drama rather than documentary. Thus, while it's true that a suburban couple were able to crack the Zodiac's cryptogram where the FBI and CIA failed, some of the Zodiac's later coded messages were never cracked. Graysmith's visit to the hardware store to confront Allen didn't occur. What did happen, according to Belfield, was that an FBI agent in the mid-1970s brought one of the surviving victims, Bryan Hartnell, to surreptitiously identify Allen as the killer at the hardware store he worked at. Another survivor, Mike Mageau, identified Allen from photographs in 1992, but as you will see from the text at the film's end the police had run out of time.
This film is well acted and nicely photographed, but, like the real investigation, long and meandering, with several story lines becoming dead ends. If I were Governor Schwarzenegger I'd have an enquiry into the California police forces  there's clearly a major public administration problem there. I sometimes despair of the proficiency of the large and fairly professional NSW police force, but having a whole lot of little bailiwicks which don't talk to each other is ridiculous.