I need to know who he is. I . . . I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye and I need to know that it’s him.
I’m not gonna lie, I struggled with this movie on a first viewing. I think I went in expecting something different and part of that is probably the marketing of the movie. The posters certainly try to sell the movie as, if not pure horror, at least a scary thriller. And it’s not to say that this movie doesn’t have horrifying moments; one stabbing in particular is quite disturbing and there’s a genuinely terrifying scene involving a young woman with a baby having car trouble and encountering a “good?” Samaritan. But by and large this movie is nearly three hours about process and the slow, tortured routes an investigation takes to ultimately, well, never be able to prove a damn thing about any of the multiple suspects this movie trots out as red herrings and plot cul-de-sacs. It’s slow and methodical and surprisingly minimal. I was expecting, honestly, none of those things. But I watched it again and a second viewing really unlocked the movie for me and after a third viewing I’m prepared to call it an absolute masterpiece.
Let’s start with the absurdly stacked cast. Our three main characters are played by Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo and these are all actors who tend to give very exterior, sometimes downright tic-ridden, performances. But Fincher gets them all to back down and give pretty minimal, but very human, performances. Downey Jr. gets away with more than the other two, but Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo are both about as minimal and subtle as I’ve seen them and I feel like Ruffalo in particular is maybe career best and he’s an actor I like a lot. Both Ruffalo and Gyllenhaal underplay their respective climactic scenes and that adds to the amibiguous, uncertain feeling that the film so carefully creates. A secret weapon here is absolutely Anthony Edwards as Ruffalo’s partner, a dogged, dead-pan Joe Friday-esque cop who is quick with an inflectionless quip. Brian Cox shows up for an extended cameo as celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli. Elias Koteas is absolute perfection as a detective. John Carroll Lynch only has a couple of scenes, but he’s absolutely brilliant as Arthur Leigh Allen, one of the suspects. Clea DuVall turns in a great performance with just one scene. Chloe Sevigny makes a character that is a bit underwritten, if we’re being honest, into a living, breathing human being. And Ione Skye makes an uncredited appearance in the film’s most frightening sequence. Charles Fleischer has another incredibly brief role, but he absolutely chills the viewer. And then let’s fill in the other supporting parts with the following: Philip Baker Hall, John Terry, Donal Logue, Dermot Mulroney, Zach Grenier, John Getz, James Le Gros, Adam Goldberg and, back when nobody knew who he was, an excellent Jimmi Simpson. This is very much an ensemble piece and Fincher has cast it down to the ground with pure gold.
But even as it is very slowly paced and intellectually precise, it’s also a mood piece of a kind. David Shire’s minimal score is beautiful and absolutely perfect and the visuals are striking in their own way, not always showy or flashy (though when it wants to be flashy, as in a lengthy timelapse of the TransAmerica Building, it absolutely nails it), but incredibly evocative. The script is layered and complex and it’s really invested in capturing the atmosphere of the times. It isn’t economical or precise, but it shouldn’t be. It takes the time to lead you down dead alleys and into cul-de-sacs, spending sometimes a few scenes on a lead that goes nowhere or a crime that it turns out the Zodiac mostly likely isn’t even connected with. It peppers you with the names of suspects that you don’t even get to meet because it wants to create a fog of uncertainty. It isn’t sloppy, so it’s not foggy in the sense of confusing, just foggy in the sense of ambiguity. Because this is past history, right? And if you know anything about the Zodiac, the one thing you definitely know is that he was never brought to justice. I didn’t know a lot of the details of the crimes we see here, but I knew that going in. So while Greysmith and Toschi definitely feel like they know the identity of the killer by the end of the movie, we’re left with something of an unsatisfying conclusion or at least a melancholy one. The final shot of Ruffalo in the film is really brilliant, deeply sad in a way, evocative of a world where at least something approximating the truth can be known, but not really acted on. A conclusion can be drawn, but not arrived at, if you know what I mean. I think it’s best summed up with that final scene of Gyllenhaal’s character; he knows what he believes and he believes what he knows, but Gyllenhaal’s performance in that final shot is minimal enough that I’m not sure he gets the emotional catharsis he’s looking for. So the film treads a fine line of being ambiguous but not nihilistic and when you’re telling a story about a serial killer that’s a particularly fine line. Fincher, once again, threads the needle. 4 stars.
tl;dr – methodical, evocative, ambiguous film explores the Zodiac killer and the world he operated in; a sharp, layered, complex script and a near flawless ensemble of performers. 4 stars.