Flicker Fusion

The great David Thomson has said that David Fincher’s Zodiac — released on DVD this month — is his worst yet:

“A terrible disappointment in which an ingenious and deserving all-American serial killer nearly gets lost in the meandering treatment of cops and journalists obsessed with the case. A great deal of Fincher’s energy and most of his aggression are gone. Perhaps he would say he has grown up … But it begins to suggest that American movies are still best just short of growing up.”

Indeed, for those who are passionate about Fincher’s Se7en and Fight Club, Zodiac’s apparent conservatism may have an underwhelming effect. It is, as Thomson suggests, albeit disparagingly, ‘grown-up film-making’: it seeks to slowly absorb you rather than batter your senses.

I can see why this rattles Thomson’s cage; it probably puts him in mind of the careful, earnest cinema of Stanley Kramer. But, being a middlebrow type myself, I really liked Zodiac: it harks back to a time when mainstream American cinema did seem grown up, or at least to be growing up. It strikes its clearest parallels with the slow-moving, procedural thrillers of the seventies: Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City — films that assumed an attention span was alive within the audience.

I have more respect for the film after reading the Zodiac books by Robert Graysmith. Graysmith’s tomes are repetitive and clunkily-written, and they tend to get stuck in the tabloid sludge of the gummiest true-crime writing. They are packed with detail, some of it fascinating: Graysmith was on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle when Zodiac was sending taunting letters to the editor.

But the author failed to flesh out the key characters in the story — detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), SF Chronicle writer Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and, not least, himself. Fincher addresses this. Ruffalo may look a little too much like Columbo, but his weary, laconic cop is a quietly fascinating performance, and steals the film from Downey Jnr, who, as the flamboyant Avery, seems to be making a clear lunge for next year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

For me, though, much of Zodiac’s compelling power lies in its attention to visual detail: the recreation of the Chronicle’s late sixties newsroom; the shiny, boxy cars and hemmed-in fashions of the period; the loose-leaf-stacked smokiness of the detectives’ office; the outdoor police phone that Ruffalo uses on a busy highway and the siren he sticks – Kojak-like – onto the roof of his car as he speeds away.

Fincher isn’t just expertly funnelling a warehouse-full of case facts into an accessible movie here, he is also vividly recreating San Francisco (Zodiac’s stomping ground) at precise moments in time. One scene, indicating the passage of years, uses CGI to recreate, in faux time-lapse photography, the construction of the city’s Transamerica tower. This little nugget is as inventive and as audacious as anything Fincher has done before.

Fincher may be growing up, becoming less aggressive, but he’s still pretty fascinating to watch.