ROBERT DOWNEY JR. AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL IN ZODIAC

Fincher goes vérité and plodding

David Fincher's Zodiac, like Billy Ray's Breach, approaches what's normally a sensational theme (finding a murderer, catching a spy) in a flat and realistic way. The critics prefer Zodiac; the public prefers Breach. Breach has a payoff. The spy gets caught, even if the process of getting him is more sweaty than flashy. Zodiac exhaustively explores a serial killer case that was never solved. Zodiac lacks any of the fulfillment of traditional drama and storytelling. Zodiac gives us police procedure, rather than a "police procedural." The case is exciting, lurid, but without a payoff. Therein lies Zodiac's originality. The pleasure of chasing clues for their own sake has never been shown in a movie. The excitement of such a story usually derives from a progression that here never happens.

As Walter Chaw puts it, "Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-'catchable' foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men." In his admiring Village Voice review, Nathan Lee says, "The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. 'I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,' complained one viewer. Exactly!" For Lee, that was intriguing and radical. For me it was simply demoralizing. Zodiac is, after all, a movie. And with its able cinematographer Harris Savides and its cast of well known actors, it declares itself to be a movie at every turn, despite its scrupulous adherence to the known.

As Zodiac makes its way through its excruciating two and a half hours, the attention gradually, and necessarily, shifts from the elusive killer to a straight arrow named Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a newspaper cartoonist and former Eagle Scout whose obsession with the case is marginally intense enough to keep us going. At least it keeps him going. While traditional crime movies focus on cases that get solved, the payoff this time is that Graysmith writes a book. And his book is the main source of this film, whose screenplay he coauthored. What's Graysmith doing now? Nathan Lee tells us: he's writing a book called Shooting Zodiac, about the production of this film.

This is a change for Fincher. His career highpoints are the flashy, cultish Se7en and Fight Club, with the less stellar The Game and Panic Room in between. Se7en, like Zodiac, concerns a serial killer, but the earlier film is shocking, thrilling, horrifying. Even though Zodiac shows gruesome killings and attempted killings, they feel ugly rather than exciting. They're necessary to understand what the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle (where Graysmith worked as a cartoonist at the time) and various law enforcement agencies are worked up about.

The self-identified Zodiac killer kept Californians terrorized for ten months of 1968 and 1969. There were seven verified victims, of whom two survived. The Zodiac stayed in the news by writing taunting letters and cryptograms to the newspapers up until 1974. He spoke of man as the most dangerous prey of all and killing people as fun. He made many threats -- including a promise to kill all the kids on a school bus. He claimed many other victims, but none was verified. There were many suspects, only one seriously investigated, Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), who's repeatedly questioned and searched. There was much circumstantial evidence against him but no physical evidence, and the police decided not to press charges. The file was closed, then reopened in 2004. No one was ever caught. The FBI, local and state police, and various press people and experts were drawn into the tangled case.

Fincher draws on top people to tell this story, which is based largely on screenplay coauthor Graysmith's original book. When eccentric celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli gets drawn into the case, he has Brian Cox to play Belli (Cox is always good, but he's not as fussy or elegant as the real Belli was). When the director needs someone to play a substance-abusing San Francisco Chronicle writer who became identified with the case, he uses Robert Downey Jr, who surely knows this territory. For the straight-arrow Chronicle cartoonist Graysmith it's Jake Gyllenhaal. Because Gyllenhaal is appealing and righteous with a slight edge of excessive intensity, he's well cast. For the thankless role of Graysmith's date, then his wife, whose main importance is that she has to take a secondary role to Zodiac, the sympathetic Chloë Sevigny was called in. For David Toschi, a chief police inspector on the case -- like Avery, Graysmith, and his wife, one of its casualties -- we get Mark Ruffalo (using a light voice that's a little too artificial and attention-catching). For the handwriting expert who retires and turns to drink, Sherwood Morill (another casualty?) Fincher gives us Philip Baker Hall. There are also familiar incidental faces like those of Dermot Mulroney, James Le Gros, Anthony Edwards (as Toschi's partner William Armstrong, and another casualty), Elias Koteas, Clea DuVall, and many others. It's a good cast but maybe a too recognizable one for what purports to be something like vérité. This is without mentioning the darker shadow world of incidental informers and suspects, who while (perhaps fortunately) are less recognizable, seem equally well chosen. There's craftsmanship and teamwork here. It just seems wasted sometimes.

Probably because of the Zodiac's taunting letters and the way the case was publicized, he's been a great influence on popular fiction and film and the public mind. Eight movies relate to him, including Dirty Harry, and at least five novels and several graphic novels as well as numerous pop songs. But does this make a great movie? Fincher's epic, in some ways impressive, version is engrossing but ultimately disappointing.

Zodiac,157 mins., premiered NY Feb. 28 and LA Mar. 1, 2007. For Nathan Lee's and other reviews see Metacritic, which assigned a critical rating of 79%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.