Takes many liberties with the facts of the case, but as a film it works beautifully

Rating: 9/10 (2 November 2011)

Entertaining, engrossing, the kind of movie you compulsively watch again and again...David Fincher's "Zodiac" plays fast and loose with reality, but perfectly captures the atmosphere surrounding the unsolved Zodiac murders of 1968-69 and the bottomless, sometimes destructive, fascination the case exerted on police and amateur sleuths alike. The ensemble cast is first-rate: Jake Gyllenhaal as San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who becomes obsessed with discovering Zodiac's identity as the killer mails one taunting letter after another to the newspaper's offices, Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery, the Chronicle columnist who is likewise drawn into the web and suffers mightily for it, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards as Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong, the veteran cops on Zodiac's trail, Chloe Sevigny as Graysmith's long-suffering wife, and John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen, the eccentric, physically imposing man whom both Toschi and Graysmith come to believe is the murderer. 157 minutes go by in a breathless rush as events unfold on the screen; more than a decade passes and Zodiac remains maddeningly out of reach, but the viewer is intrigued and absorbed by the journey these real-life characters take. Having praised "Zodiac" as art, I don't mind pointing out what a mess it is factually. The most glaring of Fincher's deliberate errors is the relationship between Robert Graysmith and Paul Avery (a major feature of the film). The two men didn't know each other while working at the Chronicle; according to Avery they met only twice, years after they'd both left the newspaper. And while Arthur Leigh Allen (who died in 1992) looked like a great suspect for a while, authorities have never been able to connect him to the Zodiac murders. Not only did Allen's handwriting fail to match the killer's but, in 2002, DNA recovered from a stamp on one of Zodiac's letters did not match Allen's DNA profile. This point is conceded at the end of the film...but in painfully small type that does nothing to alter the impression repeatedly reinforced by Fincher: that Allen *was* Zodiac, and that all the circumstantial evidence makes this conclusion inescapable. It doesn't. No, "Zodiac" does not exactly tell the true story of those horrific murders at the close of the '60s and the long investigation that followed (how could it, being based as it is on Graysmith's stunningly inaccurate 1986 book?), but it's a sprawling epic that does precisely what a movie is supposed to do. It entertains, it fascinates, it makes you want to tell other people that they should see it, too. But because the source of this fascination is a series of real-life murders, advise your friends to seek out the facts of the case after seeing Fincher's film.