So they do still make ‘em like they used to…
May 28th, 2007 by Frank
‘Alien 3′ wasn’t much of a film as far as I can remember, but ‘Se7en’ was great. ‘The Game’ was a bit crap but ‘Fight Club’ was fantastic. ‘The Panic Room’ was awful which meant surely we were due a good one from director David Fincher.
And he delivered, with Zodiac.
Based on a book about an actual serial killer who called himself Zodiac, the film follows journalists and detectives as they investigate, and report on, the Zodiac’s killings.
Zodiac is based in the 70’s and has a distinctly Seventies feel to the direction. As a fan of seventies films, this worked for me, though this will probably be a love it/hate it type film.
The film has it’s flaws, but it succeeds in conveying a certain reality that is missing from 90% of films - particularly films of this type which often ditch reality for a more ‘dramatic truth’, shall we say. Zodiac makes us feel the frustrations of a real investigation, the elusiveness of solid facts, the shifting nature of ‘truth’, the subjectiveness of things such as handwriting evidence and the general grinding reality of police work.
We also experience the senselessness of the killers actions through the character of Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Graysmith, the author of the book upon which this film is based, is a cartoonist working for a paper which reports on the killings. Graysmith becomes obsessed with Zodiac, unable to let go… “I… 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.”
While the horror of the killings themselves are portrayed in the several short scenes which feature the killer himself, it is through Graysmith’s obsession that we really wonder about the senselessness of the killings. Graysmith’s obsession seems to be fuelled by that senselessness, as he hunts for meaning, firstly in the killers cyphers, and later through the mire of endless case files as he researches his book.
The film is packed with fine actors, all giving great performances. Yes, I could nit-pick that Mark Ruffalo never quite seemed the type to wear bow-ties or that Gyllenhaal didn’t quite perfect his nerdy character, or that Robert Downey Junior’s bizarrely perfect posture was oddly distracting, or that Anthony Edwards line about japanese food was thoroughly unconvincing but why nit-pick when this is one of the most entertaining ‘mainstream’ films I’ve seen in a while.
This is a film I will go to see a second time in the cinema.
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June 10th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I have now seen Zodiac and it is just the second non-foreign language film I’ve loved this year.
What are it’s flaws Frank, or do you mean the nit-picking stuff at the end of your post?
Anyone who hasn’t seen it yet should go a.s.a.p
June 10th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Also found this, which is good news.
June 10th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
interesting - I read that book, Blindness, difficult one to make a faithful film of it had a very dreamlike quality to it…
I suppose I’m being harsh when I say Zodiac is flawed, as it is an exceptionally good film - I liked it even more the second time around.
I felt on first viewing that the film fell a little bit between stools at times, and that due to the ambitious nature of trying to pack in so much information that happened over a long time span into one film, aspects of the film could have used more space to breathe.
Actually, to answer your question properly I’d need to sit down and think it through a bit more - I know more or less what i mean, but haven’t sat down and teased it out properly.
But two brief examples of what I mention above:
When Robert Graysmith visits the guy who ran the cinema where a Zodiac suspect worked it felt a little like Fincher was losing faith in his approach and wavered between making the scene comedic and keeping it serious.
I would have liked to see more of Ruffalo’s character’s work, chasing down dead end leads etc. It’s a credit to Ruffalo that he got the character’s experience across so perfectly when in reality we didn’t see a whole lot of the investigation itself.
I realise that most of the flaws in the film are due to it’s ambition, and so am more than willing to forgive them all.
I don’t know how one could even rectify what I’m talking about without making a 12 hour film…
June 10th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I know what you mean. The skipping years of time between scenes didn’t work so well for me. I found I had to remind myself of the time lapse. Not sure how else they could have done it. Maybe if the characters looked a little different or there was an obvious and sudden seasonal change it would have drawn more attention to the time lapse. The film worked for me as it is though so I’d be slow to suggest any tampering.
The two examples you mentioned could have been that way in the book.
*Spoiler warning*
The cinema suspect turned out to be Graysmith’s imagination getting the better of him so it makes sense that he would have been laughing at himself to an extent. Fincher would have wanted us to realise how it must have felt at the time too though.
Ruffalo’s character’s work is probably absent because Graysmith wasn’t there to witness it and so could only use what was in the police files he had access too.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:25 am
[...] comes ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘. With my faith in David Fincher renewed by Zodiac, I look forward to seeing this one. No release date for Ireland announced yet, but it’ll be [...]