Zodiac confounds police, viewers

Matthew Poland Guest Writer

David Fincher’s new true-crime drama, Zodiac, which documents the string of murders that terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, may just be the antithesis of his earlier thriller Se7en. Whereas Se7en proceeded mechanically, neatly (if gruesomely) assembling its interlocking pieces, Zodiac is anything but tidy. Concerned less with cheap thrills than with the minutial details of the case, the film meticulously recreates the intricate investigation into the Zodiac killer. The result is a slow-burner that stands as one of the most data-packed movies in recent memory.

Beginning with a brutal sequence depicting the murder of an adulterous couple, the film immediately shows us what’s at stake. The unflinching depictions of violence are few and far between, but they anchor us in the moment, instilling us with the same fear that gripped San Francisco’s denizens. After the opening sequence, Fincher quickly introduces us to clean-cut cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and star crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), both employees at the San Francisco Chronicle, where the killer sends a series of encrypted messages boasting about his crimes. Piqued by these ciphers, Graysmith and Avery attempt to crack the code and, along with homicide inspector Dave Toshi (Mark Ruffalo), become embroiled in an investigation that will consume their lives for decades.

All three leads fit their parts perfectly. Gyllenhaal, too often relegated to roles requiring a ruggedness that the baby-faced actor lacks, finds an ideal match in the ingenuous Graysmith, whose Boy Scout training makes him an unlikely pursuer of the Zodiac killer. Downey Jr. imbues Avery with the free-willed flamboyance of a reporter who knows he’s on the top of his game. Ruffalo strikes the perfect balance between hard-boiled detective and stoic protector.

The first two-thirds of the film follow these three men’s frustrating search for the killer, and acutely document the failings of a vast bureaucracy to adequately process the barrage of information that assaults it. Working for the San Francisco Police Department, Toshi must coordinate his investigation with the surrounding districts—a nuisance that continually hinders his access to and control of information. Likewise, miscommunication plagues the police’s hunt for the killer, who is incorrectly—and inexplicably—identified as African-American, a comment on racial politics. In one magnificent shot, Fincher perfectly demonstrates the men’s inability to manage the data they’ve been given: Tracking Toshi and his partner through a San Francisco police station littered with unopened letters, Fincher superimposes digital scribblings of letters and symbols from the Zodiac’s ciphers; the men become swallowed up in the signifiers of a code they can’t crack.

In the film’s final third, the focus zooms in on Graysmith, whose obsession with the case consumes his every free moment. As the naïve cartoonist sorts through police files, rankles interviewees, and holds clandestine midnight meetings, his obsession becomes our own, and Zodiac reveals itself to truly be a tale of the Information Age. A portrait of the ways we process data, the film ultimately becomes concerned with our need for certainty in a world glutted with information. As Graysmith attempts, impossibly, to connect an infinitude of dots, we ourselves are processing the excess of data the film doles out to us. (The film’s canniest metatextual move is to incorporate disparate genres into its thriller narrative, forcing us to deal with extra pieces that don’t cohere to a single framework.) By drawing us into that obsessive mindset, Fincher suggests the inevitability of constructing patterns from information, but also the danger that arises when we presume to arrive at truth from these patterns. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I can think of few themes more resonant.