"Zodiac"

This tale of a real-life murderer known as the Zodiac killer is one director's shot at making the ultimate serial-killer movie.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Mike Mageau (Lee Norris) and Darlene Ferrin (Ciara Hughes)

March 2, 2007 | David Fincher, who grew up in Marin County in the '60s and '70s, has called the Zodiac killer -- who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in those years -- "the ultimate bogeyman." "Zodiac," Fincher's obsessively manicured account of the murders and the subsequent investigation -- the case has never been definitively solved -- is clearly the director's attempt at making the ultimate serial-killer movie, a labyrinthine study that pokes into some very dark corners of dread, suspense, madness and frustration.

Instead of picking through the details and dramatizing the most significant ones, Fincher lays them all out for us in a meticulously crosshatched engraving: Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why. And Fincher can't stop himself from portraying the murders (in one case, in extremely graphic detail), as if addressing them more obliquely might possibly dilute their horror -- as if their horror could be diluted. His approach, and his coldness, may be some kind of point-of-pride demonstration of artistic objectivity. But is there any such thing as an objective artist? And if so, do we want, or need, one?

Fincher opens the picture with a carefully plotted sequence that establishes the picture's disquieting mood: A nice-looking young woman and a guy who comes off as sweetly shy -- we later learn that their names are Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau, and they're played by Ciara Hughes and Lee Norris -- drive to a golf course parking lot one evening, ostensibly to sit in the car and talk. Darlene, who's behind the wheel, is visibly nervous, and when Mike asks her why, she deflects the question. But he notices that a dark car, driven, it seems, by someone Darlene knows, has been trailing the couple. The car stops behind them, and a figure steps out, shining a flashlight, cops-in-lover's-lane style, into their faces. They can't see -- and neither can we -- that the flashlight is strapped to a weapon. The bullets riddle the couple's bodies, and Fincher shows the spasms and blood spurts in fetishized detail. The mysterious figure walks away, only to come back when he realizes he hasn't finished the job, unloading more bullets into these already limp bodies.

It's less an opening sequence than an assault and seizure. And I'd be more willing to accept its effectiveness if Fincher didn't try to top it later, with a stabbing sequence in which we see a knife, at close range, being plunged repeatedly into a man's back as his hogtied girlfriend watches in horror next to him, and then her body twitching as she, too, is knifed.

If Fincher were merely going for sensationalism, you could at least chalk his tactics up to honest sleaze. But Fincher wants sensationalism and class, too, seemingly unaware that you can't have both. And through the rest of "Zodiac," Fincher amasses details with so much zeal that he barely bothers to stop to notice their significance, or lack thereof.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, the former San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist who went on to write two books about the Zodiac killer (on which the movie is partially based; the screenwriter is James Vanderbilt). Graysmith, Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and their colleagues at the paper become drawn into the case when the Zodiac sends a letter, along with an encrypted note, to the Chronicle offices demanding that the missives be published, or else he'd launch an even bigger killing spree. (He will later threaten to shoot out the tires of a school bus and then "pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.") The third and fourth major players in the investigation are police inspectors William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the latter of whom, in particular, becomes rattled by the way the Chronicle employees nose their way into the case.

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