frightening, engrossing account of the hunt for a notorious Bay Area killer

Rating: 10/10 (3 March 2007)

As a rule, movies about real-life, unsolved murders tend to be -- by their unresolved nature -- not very satisfying, which is probably why none of the dozens of films based on the Jack the Ripper story over the years have been particularly memorable.
We had a perfect example of this last fall with "The Black Dahlia," Brian De Palma's historically reckless and disastrously over-the-top film-noir fabrication based on Los Angeles' most celebrated unsolved murder of the '40s.
But "Zodiac," David Fincher's scrupulously factual drama about the determined serial killer who eluded Northern California police for more than two decades, manages to be an absorbing and fulfilling experience -- even though it ends with a question mark.
Its story begins July 4, 1969, with a terrifying scene right out of "Bonnie and Clyde," as a young couple parked in a lonely spot near the town of Vallejo is attacked by a gunman who unleashes a hail of bullets, killing the girl and wounding the boy.
The next day, letters arrive at the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers from a man claiming responsibility and calling himself "Zodiac." He includes a coded message and instructions that the letter be printed on the front page, or more murders will follow.
Thus begins a saga that will cover decades and include 20 more letters taunting the police (and threatening mass murder of children), 47 possible victims (no one knows for sure how many) and enough clues and suspects to fill a 10-hour miniseries.
The film's first half, which dramatizes Zodiac's more famous killings, his cat-and-mouse interplay with Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and the crisis his crimes create in the Chronicle board room, makes for the best newspaper movie since "All the President's Men."
The second half takes place in later years, as Zodiac becomes inactive, the police lose interest and the case becomes the personal obsession of two men: S.F. cop Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Graysmith, who spent 30 years researching the case and wrote two books about it that were the basis of the script, gradually puts all the information of the competing Bay Area police departments together, finds clues of his own and makes a convincing case for Zodiac's identity.
The movie is rather long (two hours, 38 minutes) and often demanding, with a vast tapestry of characters and incidents. And it loses some of its frantic pace and dramatic coherence -- and throws in an unneeded red herring or two -- in its final act.
But, overall, it works. Fincher has crafted a true-crime epic: a sprawling, ambitious, no- nonsense drama that rejects most of the clichés of the serial-killer formula and comes together as a mystery, an ensemble character study and a "Da Vinci Code"-like puzzle movie.
Above all else, "Zodiac" is a dazzling period piece that manages, in almost every scene, to eerily capture the mood of its principal era -- the '70s -- and shrewdly comments on how the computer has made it as distant to us as the Middle Ages.