Head in a Box

Zodiac

Directed by David Fincher

David Fincher, the brainless Kubrick, perpetrates another foul pop landmark with Zodiac. It’s an epic-length dramatization of the legal and journalistic efforts made to uncover the infamous serial killer who stalked California starting in 1969 and, using the moniker “Zodiac,” sent coded warnings to police and newspapers. Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt provide no definitive answers to the killer’s mysterious identity, yet that doesn’t hinder their prurience. Fincher’s talent? Knowing that violence not only sells, it thrills.

Specializing in lurid stories of violence and madness, Fincher taps the zeitgeist. His 1995 hit Se7en was praised by nihilistic critics for its glorying in modern-day grotesques. Audiences were simultaneously appalled and agitated—a peculiar mix of fear and excitement that initiated the Fincher cult. Zodiac continues this perverse appreciation through a tedious, numbly-paced police-procedural storyline and contrasting flamboyant digital-video technique. The usual artistic interest in human experience is replaced with Fincher’s almost immoral emphasis on film technology (that’s why he is idolized as a modern-day Kubrick).

At two and a half hours, Zodiac is a slack thriller. Tension dips and stretches like links of an expansion bridge between scenes of killings and the messages deciphered by Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). These nerdy, soft-voiced males are reminiscent of Fincher’s Fight Club, the ultimate white-boy paranoia film. Yet, the decidedly unmacho Zodiac is strangely enervated and lacks compelling emotion because Fincher’s only interested in aestheticizing every shot into a Kubrick ideogram—as in an overhead image of the Golden Gate Bridge that detaches from the story, becoming only about itself.

That bridge F/X is the movie’s money shot. It will certainly get the fanboys wet—perhaps more than the cruelly detailed, methodical gun and knife attacks and some silly haunted house stunts in the second half. It’s merely showy and does nothing to probe the mystery of evil or the lead characters’ morbid obsession with unsolvable crimes. Problem is: Fincher’s technique distracts from a resolved mystery or narrative closure; it encourages apathy that suggests resolution and absolution are impossible. Zodiac’s ending is a shocking let-down, not because it’s gruesome but because it nullifies itself. This time, Fincher puts everybody’s head in a box.

Toschi and Graysmith’s decades-long pursuit becomes a dead goose chase. This interminable come-on is characteristic of Fincher’s advertising background in the way it reduces audience interest to pointless money shots and sound-bites. He has mastered a shallow craft; his faux artistry diminishes film narrative to soullessness. Fincher pilfers the cultural past the way music video directors catalog art-book images. He transposes the phenomenon of serial-killer paranoia into the trivia of pop tunes as period markers, then references period movies from Dirty Harry to All the President’s Men—movies that aren’t good enough, three decades later, to evoke any useful emotion.

Fincher, the neo-Kubrick-nerd, has lost his bearings. Rather than convey the eerie helplessness of a community gripped by fear, such as a film equivalent to The Smiths’ haunting “Suffer Little Children” (about ’60s mass-murders in England), Zodiac remakes Alan Pakula’s stultifying All the President’s Men. Pakula’s film makes an absurd model since it cloaked its own era in portentousness (see Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite for the true essence of Watergate paranoia).

There were beautiful, subliminal traces of ’70s cinema in Munich and The Good Shepherd but Fincher’s homage is more arty than evocative or factual—just a nerdy excuse to imitate Gordon Willis’ cinematography. The superb Harris Savides provides extraordinary video mimickry of Willis’ florescent-bulb newsroom lighting and dark exteriors. He maintains Fincher’s signature color coordinates—yellow and teal schemes mutate to tan and green or amber and blue—but still can’t resolve video’s inability to properly replicate skin tones. Fittingly, Zodiac’s style goes from film noir to film sour. Film culture regresses when the wrong movie—and the wrong director—gets lionized.