Zodiac

(2007)

Directed by

David Fincher

Review by Zach Saltz

When Gustavo Santaolalla’s profoundly unmemorable array of bangs, fizzles, and chirps in Babel recently won the Academy Award for Best Score, I found myself wondering why the Academy hasn’t broadened the category to encompass music not necessarily directly written for the nominated films.  If this were so, than there would be little question that The Departed would have taken home the award simply for its inclusion of the Van Morrison cover of Comfortably Numb during the surprisingly effective Cathartic Sex Scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Vera Farmiga (not that I have problems with the original David Gilmour-Roger Waters track in The Wall -- trust me -- but it’s undeniable that Morrison’s tangy, wistful screams are more apropos to the internal maladies of a psychedelic trip on acid).

That being said, David Fincher’s Zodiac uses Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man to such perfection that it’s a wonder why the director doesn’t play it more than a brief anonymous section toward the middle of the movie, and then over the end credits.  Like Zodiac’s circular but nonetheless compulsively intriguing subject, the famed Zodiac killer of San Francisco in the early 1970s, no one can adequately tell you what Donovan is exactly saying in his cerebral lyrics about rolly pollys and unenlightened shadows.  With his sporadic slayings fused with his frequent phone calls of heavy Darth Vador-inspired breathing, the Zodiac killer is likewise a classic product of the psychedelic movement, and it’s no wonder that Fincher includes radio shows from the era with callers claiming that Zodiac is none other than a Satan-worshipping, anti-establishment hippie from Haight-Ashbury (perhaps they had seen Dirty Harry a few too many times).

The players here are uniformly solid.  Mark Ruffalo’s Colombo knock off and Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist everyman (reminiscent, no doubt, of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters) are continually at odds about how much Zodiac should be pursued, even after the slayings fade temporarily. Robert Downey Jr.’s drugged-out, wryly biting Avery was a role probably written explicitly for only Downey (or maybe Jeff Goldblum).  There are also a host of idiosyncratic players who appear and reappear throughout, including Brian Cox as Melvin Belli, the lawyer revered by Zodiac who brushed shoulders with celebrities in the 70s while not making casual appearances on Star Trek (adhering to the law that all movie serial killers must invariably be nerds), and Chloe Sevigney, who diligently continues the tradition of the “Concerned-yet-Servile Wife” (Fincher at least has the conscientiousness to spare us the pathos of having her shatter a mirror in painful moment of insidious self-realization, like Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind).  But the movie belongs to Gyllenhaal, especially in the film’s third act; while Fincher almost tragically regresses to clumsily-employed creepy noises inside awkwardly-placed haunted houses, Gyllenhaal plays along and, as he proved in Donnie Darko and The Day After Tomorrow, is able to transcend the flaws of the script while still grinning chirpily like a outgrown boy scout (or, as is the case here, Eagle Scout).

Fincher is a director who has a flair for macabre shock (remember what was inside that box at the end of Se7en?).  He also has a flair for unmotivated final twists (The Game), macho porn (Fight Club), and militant feminist allegories (The Panic Room).  Zodiac is rather undistinguishable and a little too much like bubble gum for what I had anticipated out of Fincher.  While effective as a by-the-books police procedural, the extra shock value we’ve come to expect from the director simply isn’t there, save its vastly overanalyzed use of uncompressed digital video format.  Still, as a March release with an inflated running time of over two-and-a-half hours, Zodiac is as solid of entertainment you’re likely to find in the month of March (off the basketball court, that is).

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