“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
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By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
Studying a director’s career, it becomes easy to see patterns. The peaks and such. For example David Fincher; the thing with David Fincher’s career though is that for quite a while every other movie he made was a masterpiece. More than that, every one was actually better than the last. Granted, there was no way to know when I was sitting in the theater watching “Zodiac” for the first time that it would be, hat I consider, the best film he’d ever make… but in retrospect, it does make perfect sense. How can anyone top this? It’s a legitimate, sprawling epic as well as being intimate to the point of claustrophobia. This film is a legitimate masterwork. Having said that, it’s disturbing to me that “Zodiac” is hardly ever talked about except almost as a footnote in Fincher’s career. Granted, “Fight Club”, Fincher’s previous masterpiece wasn’t really appreciated until a while after it left theaters but it’s been more than a decade and I’m still waiting for “Zodiac” to get its due.
If you asked most people what this film was about, they’d say it was about the Zodiac killer that menaced California decades ago. It’s easy to say that but it’s not really true, though. At the very least, it’s a woefully incomplete description. “Zodiac” is a film about obsession. It is a film about what obsession can and will do to people if allowed to. At the end of the film, it’s not really spoiling anything to say all the main characters have been broken in one way or another by their obsession with the Zodiac case. That’s the real tragedy of the story. It’s not that the killer has never actually been caught. It’s what the Zodiac’s rampage did to Californians who never even had meaningful contact with the killer. It’s even more so what the pursuit of the Zodiac did to some of those closest to the case. It’s the indelible stain on world-famous policeman David Toschi’s work. It’s the never-ending downward spiral of Paul Avery’s career. It’s the destruction of Robert Graysmith’s family. More so, it’s what the case did to their relationships with each other. That’s the part that sticks with me long after the movie is over. Sure, on a certain level, the film is about the Zodiac killer. I wonder who the Zodiac was and lament that they never faced justice but the most haunting part of the story is the victimization of people who weren’t really the Zodiac’s targets in the traditional sense. That’s a testament to Fincher and the cast.
The main characters on paper are the three people that I mentioned but boiling it down even further reveals that “Zodiac” is really less a triptych than a story primarily about two men: Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and David Toschi, played by Mark Ruffalo. Robert Downey, Jr. is fantastic as Paul Avery and important to a lot of what happens in the story. I’m not minimizing Avery or Downey’s work playing him. However, the two guys who are truly obsessed are Graysmith and Toschi. They really can’t let it go despite the damage being done to their lives. As funny as they both can be and often are in the film, there’s something truly tragic to both Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo’s performances. In the end, they are just two men desperate to solve a seemingly impossible puzzle. They’re doing it for different reasons and coming at it from different angles but that’s really all it is. You can see it especially with Ruffalo. There’s something behind his eyes that says that he WANTS to give up and move on. He just can’t. It’s just not in him. Gyllenhaal’s character is almost the exact opposite. There’s a perpetual glee to his efforts even while his life is falling apart around him due to his obsession. Saying all that, it’s not just the main cast that is great in “Zodiac”. Anthony Edwards, John Carroll Lynch… from top to bottom, even people like Brian Cox who only have a scene or two are delivering staggeringly good work.
A large part of the artistic success of the “Zodiac” is in no small part attributable to James Vanderbilt’s script but it should go without saying that the key to all of it is David Fincher. Much has been said over the years about his perfectionism. He was notorious for nearly endless drafts of the screenplay and wanting take after take with the actors. Many people involved with the production have talked about how difficult making this film was. It was clearly worth it. Fincher’s dedication to getting the best he can out of his cast and getting every possible detail about the story exactly right is what makes “Zodiac” as good as it is. It’s his fascination with the case that makes the audience fascinated with it as well, even though they may have little or no foreknowledge of it. It’s a film that’s two and a half hours long but I’ve seen very few films that length that don’t have a single wasted second contained therein. A lot of people talk about perfect films. I’m of the opinion that they don’t really exist but if I was going to entertain the thought, “Zodiac” would be one of the only films I could ever imagine attributing the title to. In other hands, it would be an incredibly boring procedural. Fincher is a master however, and as such, I was fully engaged from beginning to end. Hell, one of the scariest scenes I’ve ever seen happens in the last half hour or so. Yeah, at the point in the movie where I could be in agony waiting for other movies to wrap up, this movie is still incredibly effective, possibly its most effective. It’s not even a horror movie in any real sense but I will always remember being tense in the theater. I was legitimately terrified.
I still think it’s funny that David Fincher finally starting getting awards season attention with the films he made that followed “Zodiac”. I like all of his work on some level or another but “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” or even “The Social Network” aren’t even close to what was achieved with “Zodiac”. To make a film that manages to feel sprawling while also feeling consistently tense seems impossible but it’s somehow managed it. David Fincher has been one of my top filmmakers for almost as long as I’ve been seriously interested in film and the one movie of his that I think about most often is “Zodiac”. Even truly great films he made before it, like “Se7en” or “Fight Club”, almost feel trite in comparison. “Zodiac” is Fincher’s magnum opus and a film that is more than due for a reappraisal.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch