Star crossed

Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), left, and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) are reporters who get tangled up in the clues and symbols left by a serial killer in the David Fincher film Zodiac. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Music in the excellent serial killer film Zodiac is low, muted funk-pop from the ‘60s and ‘70s, floating coolly around the perimeter. Without ever pushing to the foreground, the songs cue the plot, and often wittily: the opening track is from the rock opera Hair and it poses the rather relevant question, “How Can People Be So Cruel?”

People can be cruel in all kinds of inventive ways, according to Saw and Hannibal Rising, to name but two recent slasher/torture films that proffer murder as a kind of creative act, and murderers as genius artists looking for an outlet – studio space is so expensive these days that young expressionists are forced to use wells and basements. But Zodiac leaves its generic siblings looking like snuffy teen-feed by vacuuming the glamour from the violence and crafting a meticulous, brainy procedural with surprising emotional reach. This is a film about information: its getting, its forgetting, and how too much of it can drown its gatherers.

The self-titled Zodiac killer, who tormented the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s and ’70s seemed to subscribe to an urban myth newsletter, striking hitchhikers and parked couples on lovers’ lane. For years, he wrote epistles to local newspapers demanding publication of cryptograms revealing his next move. He cultivated celebrity as an Encyclopedia Brown mystery man in the days before MySpace, when his cultural currency could only be determined by eight men in an editorial meeting at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Director David Fincher doesn’t linger over the kills. Though there are very few women in this movie – men are Fincher's subject; the guy made Fight Club – the ones who do exist don’t end up operatically filleted to a fist-pumping white boy rock soundtrack. There is no turn-on here. The killer is a sadist, but his power stems from weakness. He might have come up with the name Zodiac, and proposed via newspaper that all of San Francisco wear buttons of his Prince-like symbol on their lapels (it didn’t catch on), but he got both the name and the symbol from an ad campaign for a wristwatch. His misspelled messages reveal him to be a movie fan and media freak, a pop culture gobbler. In a different era, he might have called himself Swatch. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, of course: he is the ultimate sign without a signifier – a product, not a man. He is meaningless, and this is the same terrain Fincher dynamited in Fight Club. The Zodiac may be good at branding, but he is no manifestation of biblical evil. Whoever this killer is, he’s a loser.

Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, centre) and Inspector Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards, background) are assigned to the Zodiac serial killer case. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

For a long time, that’s all the investigators know. Instead of celebrating the ingenuity of the murderer – which he did in his other serial killer film, Se7en – Fincher honours the crushing repetitiveness of detective work, showing how an unsolved case can corrode everyone it touches. Between strikes, the killer takes special notice of Jack Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), a city beat reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle with a penchant for 10 a.m. cocktails (apparently that was the way of journalism before Starbucks), a habit that turns skeevier as The Zodiac begins corresponding with him personally. Hovering over Avery’s shoulder is Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a dazed young editorial cartoonist with a thing for puzzles. Obsessive by nature, Graysmith begins his own investigation that spans three decades, plugging away when other jurisdictions have given up, and writing the two books that inspired this film.

Because the murders are spread across several California districts, separate investigations roll around like marbles. They’re corralled by San Francisco homicide inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the man who inspired Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Steve McQueen’s Bullitt; Ruffalo plays him half flip, half focused, and it works. Bad communication plagues the investigation, yet there’s something refreshingly real about how mistakes are made not out of malice or even ego, but lack of resources and bad technology. When a San Francisco cop asks for files from another town, the exchange is: “We don’t have a telefax yet.” “Neither do we. Put them in the mail.” This is face-to-face stuff: door knocking and meeting in alleys. Telephones are barely used. When Graysmith begins to dig deeper, he explains his low-tech methods: “I go to the library.” The handwriting in the letters becomes a major factor in eliminating or identifying suspects. Handwriting! Do you even do it anymore? I put a pen in my hand these days and I feel like a cat with a chopstick taped to her paw.

It’s almost as if the tactile nature of the investigation – the touching of typed reports and the handling of evidence in Ziploc bags – helps keep the cops invested for a long time, while also keeping them far from resolution. A Google or two would have been useful. Fincher makes sure that the audience is firmly on side with Graysmith and the detectives. Because the impressive script by James Vanderbilt is based on actual files and Graysmith’s tomes, there is not a single scene from The Zodiac’s perspective; he never wrote his memoirs. So when cinematographer Harris Savides hovers in the sky above a downtown taxi picking up a fare, and the camera literally turns a corner to follow that cab until it stops with a sudden flash of gunfire, it feels like a perfect High Definition recreation. All anyone ever knew about that murder was the point of pick up, and the crime scene. By keeping us out of the car, we become detectives, too, and The Zodiac is never permitted to become a hero, anti- or otherwise.

Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, left) and Melanie (Chloe Sevigny) are on the trail of the Zodiac killer. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Fincher abandons his trademark hyperbole for something controlled, but never static. Much of the film is conversation and speculation, names, dates and numbers. But it doesn’t add up to a nerd collective – this is no JFK – because actual people are doing the investigating. The emotional toll is writ on the faces of all the players (and there are a lot of these men with holsters around their backs, including Elias Koteas, Donal Logue and Dermot Mulroney). The serial killer’s other power is in slowly corroding his suitors’ optimism, faith and – because the investigation goes right up until the '80s – youth, too. The young bucks become tired men; children are born and marriages fall apart, and the trail grows colder. In one scene, years in, Toschi and his partner, Inspector Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), walk through an office and the notes and letters of the ensuing years rise up on the screen, walls of text that almost erase them. Soon after, Armstrong announces he’s retiring: “I want to watch my kids grow up.” It’s a throwaway line that reveals much about the sacrifice it is to plunge one’s hands into the guts and violence that most of us are allowed to regard as a form of entertainment.

Still, boogiemen are, for better or worse, entertaining, and Zodiac is seat-jumping scary: Fincher, often the critic’s whipping boy, presents a convincing argument that there is truly nothing creepier than a film historian with a basement. But he pulls our interest away from the boogiemen toward the real life people who set out to shoo them away and lock them up. And then he asks the terrifying question: What if they can’t help us? It’s in this unsettled reality that Zodiac exists as a marvelous, uncomforting piece of moviemaking. Graysmith absolutely needs to find his serial killer and pry him from the fantasy, perpetrated at the movies and in the media, that he matters. He needs to flush The Zodiac out of the theatre of his imagination and into the bright California light.

Zodiac opens across Canada on March 2.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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