Straight to DVD

Zodiac

When it hit theaters, I didn't think of Zodiac as a movie we'd eventually be putting in our queue. (For one thing, a serial-killer film would seem to have decent Queue Blocker potential.) But then I started hearing that it was worth checking out, and much more than your standard hunt-for-a-demented-murderer flick. When it made a bunch of critics' 10-best-of-2007 lists, I put it in the queue.

It's a pretty faithful retelling of the investigation into a series of murders in the Bay Area in the late '60s and early '70s. Like Son of Sam some years later in New York City, Zodiac was known not just for his killings, but for his cryptic, taunting letters to newspapers and to the police. Fittingly enough, then, the focus of this movie is on three men who were central to the attempt to catch Zodiac: San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), San Francisco police inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and especially Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), upon whose book the film's screenplay is based.

In a way, Zodiac is like a long, especially disturbing Law & Order episode. After seeing Zodiac's first attack (fairly graphically, by the way), we head to the Chronicle offices for the arrival of the killer's first letter. In short order, we're following twin, sometimes cooperative investigations: that of Avery and Graysmith (who becomes involved because of his proclivity for puzzles—Zodiac enjoys sending coded messages), and that of Toschi and his partner, Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

Director David Fincher gives excellent procedural, keeping the pace and the suspense especially taut in the first half of the film. He's a master of leaving his audience always a little unsure of where the investigation (and the movie) is going next. That's a triumph, given that the case's broad strokes, at least, are pretty well known.

But what really sets the movie apart is that you gradually start to realize it may really be about something more: what the search for this elusive killer—which takes us well into the late '70s—is doing to those engaged in it.

By the film's second half, the case has already chewed up and spit out Avery, and left Toschi nearly burnt out, leaving only the obsessed Graysmith to maniacally pursue stray leads (with a predictably bad effect on his marriage). Downey, Ruffalo, and Gyllenhaal each do a remarkable job of expressing the inevitable damage such intense focus on a killer has done to these men.

Yet there's also a problem with this shift in the film's emotional focus—because as it occurs, there's no change in the procedural nature of the storytelling. So the last third of what is a fairly long movie becomes unbalanced: We get an emotional climax but then just keep going, marching through the years and the false leads and the frustrating roadblocks in the investigation. It's as if Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt weren't quite on the same page. (I've read that Fincher had All the President's Men very much in mind when directing this film; you get the sense he would have liked to crib that movie's abrupt news-ticker ending to handle the last few years of this story.)

This is still a much more serious—and much better—serial-killer film than the genre's precedents give us much right to expect. Its cast, even beyond the three excellent leads, is superb (Philip Baker Hall and Brian Cox are, as always, particular standouts). Also, Fincher, among the best in the business at manufacturing atmosphere, expertly re-creates both the look and feel of a '70s American city under siege. The movie's tantalizing flirtations with brilliance may leave you—as it did me—slightly disappointed in this merely good movie, but Zodiac is intelligent and entertaining, and worth seeing.