a thinking-man's thriller

Rating: 8/10 (12 March 2007)

With "Zodiac," director David Fincher returns to the crime thriller territory he explored to such effectiveness in "Seven" a dozen odd years ago.
For over a decade - from December 1968 to the late 1970's - a serial killer calling himself The Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area, dispatching his victims seemingly at random while keeping up a cryptic, cat-and-mouse correspondence with several major newspapers in the area. Despite some impressive leads, the killer was never caught and the murders eventually stopped as quickly and mysteriously as they had started.
At 160 minutes, "Zodiac" lacks the streamlining and telescoping we've come to expect from movies about serial killers, which are more often designed for sensationalism and exploitation than contemplation and reflection. Taking a novelistic approach to the subject, screenwriter James Vanderbilt gives the drama room to breathe, allowing detail to pile upon detail, and providing an array of characters who disappear from the drama for long periods of time only to return to center stage when called upon to do so by the facts of the case.
The drawback in such a strategy is that the movie occasionally feels aimless and formless, as it ricochets back and forth between plot strands and characters that often seem at cross purposes to one another. But the distinct advantage of this approach is that the movie feels less contrived and artificial and more akin to real life, as it captures the sometimes decidedly unglamorous nature and frustratingly plodding pace of actual crime detection. And for those who might be hesitant to watch the film due strictly to its subject matter, it should be noted that, for a movie on such a grisly topic, "Zodiac" is surprisingly tame in the blood-and-guts department (thank goodness).
Indeed, the movie gets its unnerving murder scenes out of the way right up front, so it can turn its full attention to its real areas of interest: chronicling the behind-the-scenes search for the killer and exploring the psychological impact this search has on three men who become, to varying degrees, obsessed with the case. Jake Gyllenhaal, who hit a career high water mark in 2005 with "Proof," "Jarhead" and, of course, "Brokeback Mountain," continues his journey into edgy roles playing Graysmith, the rather nerdy cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who managed to get closer to unveiling the true identity of the killer than anyone else, and who went on to write of his experiences in the book, "Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed," on which the film itself is based. Graysmith was able to scoop even the lead investigator, David Toschi (sharply played by the always interesting Mark Ruffalo), who finds his life becoming ever more overtaken by the case the longer it drags on without resolution. The third major actor in the drama is Paul Avery, the crime beat reporter who turned to drink, thereby torpedoing his own career, after the killer singled him out as a potential target. It is the lack of screen time allotted to Avery that offers one of the genuine disappointments of the movie, especially as he is embodied by the brilliant Robert Downey Jr., whose own life experiences make him the perfect choice for the role.
With its meticulously mounted, pitch-perfect recreation of the details of the case as well as the times in which they took place, "Zodiac" is one of the few films of recent years that can truly be termed a thinking man's thriller.