Zodiac
Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo deliver compelling performances
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Thursday, 17, May 2007 03:39
Directed by David Fincher, out May 18th, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Edwards, running time 148 mins.
In a nutshell.
Fact is scarier than fiction
What's it all about?
Five people were killed by a serial murderer in and around San Francisco in 1968 and 1969. After the second attack, in which a 22-year-old girl was killed and a 19-year-old boy wounded, the San Francisco Chronicle received a letter from someone calling himself the Zodiac and claiming to be the murderer.
The writer backed his assertions by providing details only the true killer would be privy to and initiated a macabre game with police by providing a mysterious code which supposedly provided key details to discovering his identity. This was a test that the police never overcame - despite years of investigation, reams of paperwork and numerous suspects, no-one was ever convicted for the Zodiac killings.
Fincher's film tells the story of Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist with the Chronicle whose penchant for codebreaking attracts him to the Zodiac case; Paul Avery, the paper's top crime reporter; Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong, the San Francisco detectives assigned to the case. These characters are of just as much interest to the film as the murders themselves and the extent to which their lives are irreversibly transformed by their entanglement with the Zodiac story forms the heart and soul of the movie.
Who's in it?
Jake Gyllenhaal is as good as ever as Graysmith - a character who is warm and engaging but frighteningly resolute as his obsession with the case grows. Robert Downey Jr continues his resurgence, after it appeared that he had drifted into the wilderness of the movie world, and is brilliantly entertaining as the brash, arrogant and occasionally hilarious Avery, while Anthony Edwards (the bald one who used to be in ER) puts in a solid turn as Armstrong.
It is Mark Ruffalo, however, who competes with Gyllenhaal for showstealer status as Dave Toschi, the legendary cop upon whom such movie characters as Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt were reportedly based. The always-watchable Chloe Sevigny does an excellent job in one of the less glamorous roles - Graysmith's accommodating partner who always talks sense but is never listened to - while recognisable character actor John Carroll Lynch gives a chilling performance as Arthur Leigh Allen, one of the investigation's chief suspects and the man who Graysmith maintains to this day was the Zodiac.
As an example.
Graysmith: "I.I need to know who he is. I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye and I need to know that it's him."
Likelihood of a trip to the Oscars
Recognition from the Academy should be a real possibility for Zodiac's screenplay, owing to the massive challenge of satisfactorily exploring a police investigation that remains open to this day in a two and a half hour film. Not since Silence of the Lambs in 1991 has a film with the disturbing work of a serial killer at its heart won the best picture Oscar and Zodiac is unlikely to change that, but it will be a massive injustice if the power and impact of the film goes unacknowledged.
What the others say
"This gripping character study becomes more agonisingly suspenseful as it gets closer to an answer that can't be confirmed." - Empire
"Fincher is a powerhouse filmmaker, but he doesn't pander. He shakes you up in ways you don't see coming. Thanks to him, the still-new movie year.has busted out with something unique and unmissable." - Rolling Stone
So is it any good?
David Fincher was a seven-year-old living in San Francisco when the Zodiac was terrorising the Bay area. One of the killer's letters threatened attacks on schoolchildren as they stepped off their bus - a proposition which the young Fincher's father promptly informed his son of. The impact the killings had on the future filmmaker - Fincher has described the Zodiac as "the ultimate bogeyman" - is fully evident in his latest film and one of the major factors in its brilliance.
Fincher gives full respect to the fact that the events in his film really took place by refusing to sensationalise them. The attacks we see in the movie are depicted in a way that comes just about as close as possible to conveying the horror of murder on celluloid. The director imbues his film with an austere realism and largely ignores the dramatic tools that are traditionally employed to portray violence.
By refusing to depict death in a series of histrionic, melodramatic throes or to portray victims as heroic fighters against the onslaught of some gibbering psycho, Fincher goes some way to helping his audience understand the true horror of murder. By simply showing us a young girl being repeatedly stabbed in a simple and unadorned fashion, the director denies us the anaesthetising comfort we ordinarily gain from dramatic music, kinetic camerawork and melodramatic performances, consequently creating one of the most disturbing and chilling murder scenes in modern movie history.
The effectiveness with which Fincher presents these killings is amplified significantly by the fact that we know these events took place in a largely similar fashion to how we see them onscreen.
Just as, if not more, crucial to the success of Zodiac are the characters who are ensnared by the morbid lure of the case and outstanding performances, most notably from Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo, ensure that there is enough heart at the centre of this film to counteract the horror. It is impossible not to warm to the affable, slightly geeky Graysmith, who shows an unending resolve to discover the Zodiac's true identity when nearly all others have given up, and real-life supercop Toschi, who deals with the atrocities he witnesses with a mix of good humour, steely determination and animal crackers.
In 1995 David Fincher made the best serial killer movie since Silence of the Lambs when he created Seven and he could well have achieved a similar feat this year with Zodiac. While the director's two movies ostensibly appear to tread the same shadowy paths, they are in fact very different. Where Seven was all about using style and aesthetics to deliver excitement to the viewer, Zodiac focuses on realism, detail and the faithful depiction of true events. In so doing Fincher has made a film which, as well as offering the audience a glimpse of just how horrifying the Zodiac murders were, pays due respect to events which irrevocably changed the lives of many people.
But just as importantly, the director has achieved these feats in a film that works brilliantly as a tense and compelling thriller. With Zodiac, Fincher has created a movie that uses events that took place over 30 years ago as its subject material and belongs to one of the most over-populated sub-genres in film, yet still manages to be shocking, exciting and completely unique.
9/10
Ross Kane