Zodiac

(Paramount Home Entertainment, 7.24.2007)

I secretly want every movie to be about sadness. I like writing about sadness and I can find sadness in just about everything, but to my extreme surprise, I can't find it anywhere in Zodiac. This isn't a bad thing at all, as Zodiac rules the school in more ways than I can count, but it's interesting that David Fincher has picked a story ripened for sadness, then doesn't take a bite. For starters, if there's a sadder sacked lot of actors than Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal, I don't know who they are.

Heath Ledger could fit in here because, like Gyllenhaal, Ledger has that perma-Brokeback Mountain effect going for him. Brokeback was so sad, I am now permanently conditioned to feel slightly sorry for Gyllenhaal and Ledger, no matter what context I see them in. Even if I saw a youtube clip of one of them dancing to "Shiny Happy People" and laughing with friends at a party, the first thing I'd think is, "God do I feel bad for Ennis and Jack."

Fincher cast this sensitive, shaggy dog trio -- more on the amazing Zodiac hairstyles later -- to center the story of a murderer who made serial killing fun with his cryptograms, cat-and-mouse games, and general opaqueness towards the media and the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The result is a fun serial killer movie with a desperate center, but not a sad one. Fincher shapes his imagination for technical experimentation into a sort of serial killer romp.

There are grisly recreations of murders and police earnestly try to calm down a city and capture an intelligent but sloppy boogey man hidden in plain sight, mixed with characters' lives falling apart because they are literally entranced by the case for years on end. On the rompier side of things are scenes of road trips from county to county, lots of leaning on solid wooden desks and peeking around solid wooden doors, typewriters everywhere, no computers in sight, and late night drinking sessions followed by early morning hangover coffee breaks. To be honest, working on the Zodiac case looked like a lot of fun.

So why all this talk of sadness? Well, in my head, Fincher's Zodiac has the basic molding of a male weepy. With just a few shifts in tone and some longer camera lingers on the worn down faces of Gyllenhaal, Downey, and Ruffalo, especially as the film wears on, my review might have read:

"Zodiac is about a melancholy that won't break because a serial killer can't be caught. David Fincher disguises the grieving in his film well, focusing instead on the day-to-day frustrations and procedures of a fleet of young males desperate to catch a killer, even as they take on the worry of multiple communities affected by the killer at large. As the case remains unsolved for years and the weight becomes too great for most, three men continue carrying the case's burden."

Zodiac is a story of an imbalance that was never resolved, a sense of justice that was never exacted, and an order that was never restored. Typically, the bright side of catching a serial killer is the sense that, once they're caught, an entire community can breathe a collective sigh of relief, while imagining that perhaps all of the community's ails have been cleansed at once, if only for a time. But if not caught, the ailment remains out there (which is even creepier considering that the Zodiac killer is likely dead by now and will never be caught). In this case, the Zodiac killer is a part of that which is permanently wrong, whatever "that" is, a wrongness that has to hang in the ether forever. Those final few people on the case understood the potential for eternal loom, trying so desperately hard to solve the case, even as they were destroyed by it.

As is, Zodiac is what Mystic River would be if Mystic River was good: a police procedural that doesn't let the tears overflow. Fincher is building a career out of teaching his fans that it is possible to watch sadness without feeling sad ourselves, which for some reason is an important lesson to learn, though I don't know why exactly. Fincher has taught us this lesson before. At the end of Seven, even as Brad Pitt wailed beyond control and was dying inside before the viewer's very eyes, I felt shocked and amazed by how cool the twist ending was handled and I remember feeling weirdly elated. "This Fincher is interesting," I thought.

A word about hair. If I were to put my confidence in a cop based on his hair, Ruffalo would be my man. His hair is phenomenal in Zodiac, a thick mop of too-long curled black twine, bookended by short sideburns, all of which grays as the case remains unsolved into the 1980s and beyond. When Ruffalo first appears onscreen, he is barely audible, a mute channeling Columbo. Speaking of, in Peter Falk's heyday, Falk himself had the right hair to play Toschi. I know Columbo didn't have a partner, but he should have looked this Toschi guy up.

And speaking of `60s serial killers, when is a great Charles Manson movie finally going to come along? I nominate either Steven Soderbergh or Alexander Payne to direct. In any cae, this is a bare bones DVD. A 2-disc director's cut is coming out in early 2008. -- Jason Woloski