Zodiac
Directed by David Fincher
Zodiac is about a failure–the failure to capture a serial killer who terrorized Northern California at the end of the 1960s and into the ’70s. This is one of the most unusual true-crime movies ever made, a three-part episode of Law and Order in which the investigation takes decades and nothing ever comes to trial. It features a frightening climactic scene with an investigator menaced in a basement by a potential villain, but it turns out that the potential villain had nothing to do with the crimes. The film does finger a suspect as “the Zodiac,” and yet that suspect is never brought to justice. An end title undercuts what little satisfaction Zodiac has offered by pointing out that there is no forensic evidence to support the movie’s conclusion.
So why would you want to see such a movie? By all accounts, you don’t. It was hammered in its first week at the box office, despite enthusiastic reviews. And that’s too bad, because Zodiac is really, really good. Middlebrow critics of an earlier era used to commend films for being “thought-provoking,” which was precisely the sort of mind-deadening praise that drove that sort of eat-your-spinach movie criticism out of business. But “thought-provoking” is exactly the right word to describe Zodiac, a movie that causes one to reflect on whether it’s unreasonable to expect that every mystery can be solved, every crime can be punished, and justice will prevail.
Zodiac follows two major investigations. The first is conducted by the San Francisco police and led by the charmingly eccentric Det. Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). The other is undertaken by the San Francisco Chronicle and its drunk and druggie lead reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.). Toschi is overwhelmed by leads he cannot possibly track down. Avery gets nowhere until the paper’s naive young cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) starts taking a ghoulish interest in the matter.
Police officers in four California counties do their best to track down leads and investigate potential suspects during the murder spree. And yet they are hamstrung, time and again, by little mistakes that give the killer all the time and space he needs to escape capture. In the crucial minutes after the Zodiac murders a cab driver, the San Francisco police department tells all available officers to be on the lookout for a black man–and so when two cops see a white man walking away, they don’t stop him. Crime scenes are contaminated by inexperienced officers who don’t know how to handle evidence. The various police departments can’t coordinate in good time because they have to rely on the postal service rather than those newfangled fax machines that only San Francisco’s PD owns.
Almost nothing goes right here, and that’s what makes Zodiac such a fascinating piece of work. We’re entirely unused to seeing a movie about cops and reporters in which their efforts are stymied by pointless bureaucratic games, bad spur-of-the-moment decisions, and sheer garden-variety incompetence. And yet that is the way the world actually works.
In part, the cops and reporters were undone by a phenomenon that was distressingly new at the time and distressingly far less so now: the unrestrained psychotic who actually advertises his evil. The letters written by the Zodiac killer to the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers sent Californians into paroxysms of terror. His threat to take out a schoolbus full of children paralyzed the nation’s most populous state for months. And once his coded messages had their cipher broken (not by the CIA, which tried, but by a retired math teacher), they were even more chilling: “When I die I will be reborn in paradise and all I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.”
The Zodiac came to light almost exactly at the same moment that Charles Manson’s gang of psychopaths slaughtered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others in Los Angeles. The depravity involved–the act of assaulting and torturing complete strangers to scratch some demonic itch–was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.
The movie’s depictions of the Zodiac’s monstrous crimes are distressing and upsetting in exactly the right way. There’s no comedy or titillation in them, no perverse pleasure to be taken in their execution, as there is in so many scenes of deliberate murder. There is just a kind of blank and pervading horror. That’s especially impressive considering that the director of Zodiac is David Fincher, whose serial-killer movie Seven set the disgusting standard for boy-that’s-some-really-cool-torture-and-killing scenes. It’s almost as though Fincher is offering an implicit apology for the use of graphic murder as a form of visceral titillation in Seven.
Zodiac can’t wrap things up for us because that’s not what happened in real life. Closure is what we get from the movies–from Dirty Harry, the first movie to borrow from the Zodiac killings, in which Clint Eastwood’s enraged San Francisco cop first shoots the killer to get him to drop a child he’s holding hostage, and then finishes him off. Dirty Harry is an immensely satisfying movie; Zodiac is an unsettling one. In a lifetime of moviegoing, there should be room for both kinds.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
