Questions without answers (Zodiac (DVD))

Name: harlequin21

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Product:	Zodiac (DVD)
Date:	16.12.07 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent performances and direction; intense attention to detail; fresh and original in approach

Disadvantages: Requires a patient viewer; a lot to swallow at once; never really gets a firm grasp on the murders

Cinema, typically, will always give an answer to a question. Loose ends are neatly tied in most cases, presumably to accommodate to audiences. It's part of the escapism, to fulful and satisfy. David Fincher does something radically different with his new film, Zodiac. He stays true to reality, and leaves a cloud of mystery to settle over the film. The point he establishes with the real-life story is that many aspects of the world go unanswered, but it's something that we have to live with. It may frustrate, it may lead to obsession and dead ends, but there are more important things. Zodiac takes a completely fresh approach in this sense, the open-ended questions leaving the audience to brood over its many trivial details.

Throughout a decade, from the late 60s to the late 70s, the "Zodiac" loomed over the city of San Francisco like a ghost. With an increasing amount of murders to his name (though they were unremarkable in style), he remained at large, his identity unknown, something he exploited to taunt the press and the police with a series of cryptic letters. His influence would inspire all kinds of links to other unsolved homicides, and even later copycats, his legacy one that is still a significant part of San Francisco's folklore. A small group of men devoted their lives to what would prove to be an extremely lengthy investigation of this murderer; from sources, they knew he was a Caucasian male, but nothing else. The film, rather than obessessing specifically over Zodiac himself, turns its focus on these men, two police inspectors, David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), as well as two reporters, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). It's a film that, like them, revels in the details, even goes insane on them. Indeed, it takes a patient viewer to watch these people plough through the intricacies of the case, but that's the beauty of Zodiac. David Fincher continually builds jenga towers of detail, and then knocks them down again, only to build up a new one. To get closer to the psychopathic killer, his hunters had to move from source to source, specialist to specialist, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Fincher's film is unrelenting, digging its teeth in until the last, taking the audience through the labyrinth of the Zodiac case. In many ways it runs like a docu-drama, but subtly incorporates elements of the thriller genre, something Fincher is exceptionally apt at. His approach isn't going to win over the masses, but stay with it, and it embroils and intrigues, working in several chilling moments that are genuinely frightening.

But it's the performances that really anchor the film. The three leads construct some truly three-dimensional individuals that keep us hooked. Robert Downey Jr excels as the charismatic and flamboyant but erratic Paul Avery, the brilliant reporter who tore his life to shreds frustrating over the Zodiac. On the other side of the scale, Mark Ruffalo underplays Inspector Dave Toschi, the eccentric cop whose dedication to the case over the years exhausted him. And in-between them, there's Jake Gyllenhaal's utterly chaotic and disorderly rookie Robert Graysmith, who would go on to draw together all the facts of the unsolved case in his book, "the Zodiac", from which the film draws its details. The leads bounce off and compliment each other equally, though the only thing they have in common is their personal lives and careers deteriorating because of the same thing; the mystery of the Zodiac. Around them are the sources and specialists to whom they would constantly refer, played by a diverse supporting cast, including Elias Koteas, Chloe Sevigny, Donal Logue, Adam Goldberg, Philip Baker Hall, and Brian Cox. The performances brilliantly enhance the plot, adding that life to the case and its details, and they are appropriately utilised. It is notable that Fincher doesn't care so much for character development as he does about portraying the breakdown of these men's lives, so arguably, the performances, though excellent, are never allowed to reach their full range.

Fincher, however, is the real star of the film. He does something completely different from what he does with Se7en, his genius but compacted 1995 thriller, instead loading onto the audience bucket loads of information, but information that takes many twists and turns, and poses dozens of unanswered questions. Even though the end of the film leaves the inevitable loose end, Zodiac is simultenously his most chaotic but also his most accomplished film. His editing is seamless, scenes leading into one another beautifully (save some cases of substantial time lapse that leave gaps that don't link the story as well as they could) as everything is built up. He doesn't refrain from stretching the investigation to its full epic scope, not taking one medium, but several with his three leads. Everything is intricate, from the investigation itself to the rich, atmospheric 60s/70s detail (soundtrack included), to Fincher's own reconstruction of the murders; the Zodiac's (or is he the Zodiac?) basic appearance changes in correspondence with the reports of witnesses -- he was described as short and stocky by a witness on one occasion, but later said to be tall and heavy by another witness on another occasion. Was it all really one man? Did he kill five people or thirteen? Fincher does not make generalisations, but uses various actors, his attention to detail such that superficially it portrays many paradoxes. But one has faith in Fincher, his grasp on the issue tight, and he takes the audience on a slow and frustrating, but extremely intriguing ride to the very depths of the Zodiac investigation, into the dead-ended and vacuous leads, to the more trivial but ultimately more important niches.

Again, Zodiac himself is not the focus of the film. He was no remarkable or complex individual, but it was the hype and myth that surrounded him that made him such. He was no John Doe from Se7en, merely a disturbed man who exploited circumstance. By the end of the Zodiac odyssey, one realises that over-analysing doesn't always lead anywhere, and that we are victim to our own imagination. All we can do is stick to the evidence, but the contradictions and paradoxes that can present does not lead us to a complete portrait of a person. Myth can contradict what and who a person really is, and the Zodiac case is a prime example of this. Whilst Fincher highlights this, the film itself is not without problems. The Zodiac murders were certainly horrific, but we never truly get a sense of this; the murders are portrayed, but somehow Fincher comes up short on really portraying the horror of them. They're realistic and well executed, especially the opening one, but overall Fincher never really conveys the graphic horror of it in the same way that he does the intricacies of the case. These are the murders committed by a man who terrorised San Francisco for several years, but the viewer never really gets a real grip of them like in Se7en, for instance, aside from the fact that they are unremarkable and typical in manner of execution.

Aside from this, Fincher recreates the myth around the Zodiac immaculately, and brings the facts to life in an intricate, clever drama that (ostensibly) leaves no stone unturned, almost to the point that there is too much information to swallow. One can feel Fincher's obsession over the case almost as much as the characters, and he truly creates something unforgettable in that long after the credits it's still getting under the skin as the viewer reconsiders the details. Zodiac is not Fincher's tour-de-force, but it's certainly his most fresh and original movie to date, and like all his previous work, it leaves a lasting impression.

Summary: Fincher obsesses over the details in his intricate and complex docu-drama