In Cold Blood.

Rating: 8/10 (17 June 2007)

Five years have gone since "Panic Room", and the least I can say is that I was a little worry about Fincher's ability to overcome what might be the most representative and brilliant movie of the end of the last millennium : "Fight Club". All the fears and doubts of an entire generation were sum up in this movie, roll up in a brilliant and provocative package, that barely hide the sadness and depression tone of the movie. It was the apogee of Fincher's thematic since "Alien3", with its characters so obsessed by what they fight, that they lost their identity and become the evil they stand against. The impossibility of living after that and the suicidal part of the characters was link to a certain form of teenage angst, that leads to the impossibility to live in a real world. "Zodiac" stands now like the adult pendant of "Fight Club", where the anger and revolted spirit of the movie leaves to a mature reflection on evil, obsession and media. And it's most impressive.
It all starts with a murder. Others will fallow, but the first one gives the tone : everything is true, all the details stick to the reality, but something always seems unreal. We're in California, in the late 60, were a serial killer called the Zodiac will terrorized San Franscisco for years, and drove some character at the edge of madness, trying to find him. The movie focuses on three of this character : Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist who's book is adapted by Fincher, the inspector in charge of the case (Mark Ruffalo) and a crazy journalist (Robert Dowley Jr., of course). The movie details their quest in vain, focusing on their strange obsession for the case. The fact that it's a fictive reconstitution of a book that tells real events give that surrealistic (in the proper meaning of the word : over-realistic) tone to this movie. The events are all real and true, but we only watch them through minds so obsessed by their goal, that the reality and objectivity of their vision sometimes disappears. "Fight Club" was the prototype of the modern subjective movie, and despite all the realism of "Zodiac", the latest Fincher fallow its path. The greatest scenes of the movie are when Graysmith slowly falls into paranoia, thinking the killer is everywhere, and even try to force another character to say a name that sticks to his theories. Reality slowly disappears when it becomes to hard for a mind to understand it all.
To those personal quests, Fincher adds a more general point of view about our modern society and its relationship to the media. And that's also one of the great achievement of the movie to use a well known serial killer like a metaphor of all the fear of a time. And if fear is mind created by the ones that try to fight it, the role of the media is in the movie very similar : it's only because the news creates the killer by giving him a visibility that he exists. That's two aspects the movie brilliantly develops : the personal fears and the collective madness that the newspapers and the quest both nourishes. All if this thematic is really strong in other Fincher's movie, it also reminds me, thanks to the use of fiction to recreate a mind reality, Capote's "In Cold Blood", witch whom "Zodiac" shares the same precision, exactitude, sharpness, but also strangeness in its weird relation to reality.