Zodiac

Been spending summer so far knocking off some long-overdue rewatches, and I've now hit the whole holy trifecta of American films from 2007 that seem to land in literally everyone's top five of that year, if not just their top three in some permutation; No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac. All three old favorites of mine, but all three sight unseen for around a decade (I'm really bad with rewatching!), so I was eager to find out what I'd make of them now, as an (I like to think) more seasoned enjoyer of The Pictures. No huge revelations - surprise surprise, I still love all three to death - but I am a bit surprised to find that Zodiac, maybe the most restrained and unassuming of the three, has emerged as my clear favorite. To start shallow; I think this is why I love movies about guys in shirts and ties and glasses talking on phones and trying to get to the bottom of shit. Doesn't necessarily have to be a phone either, but it helps, especially if they're also holding an in-person conversation at the same time and maybe resting the phone in a weird spot, like behind their shoulder or something. Also if they tell the other guy in the room to get on the other line and listen in, shit like that. Give me some phone action and you've got me hooked. It was the film that taught me that talking on the phone is one of the most cinematic things you can do and no I'm not joking. More specifically, like The Social Network, it's a film about smart, competent people doing things; the phone is their instrument, and the film's way of arranging its mountain of information. One way, that is. This is also one of the most impeccably put-together films there is, drawing you into its mystery and dense wall of information even as it emphasizes the slow but sure passing of years, so tangibly devastating as the urgency of the scenario fades and yellows. Events, voice recordings, little fragments of facts, street names, dates, jurisdictions, physical descriptions, mistakes, inchoate reconstructions; reality as a whirlwind of intangibles, a sum of tiny little microdecisions that we'll never be able to be resolve. We the viewers know this is especially true of the case in question, so we’re in a constant state of suspension, every fade to black hitting like it came just as we were about to figure out the truth, every hard cut like a gut-punch cutting the story short, every date stamp cruelly emphasizing time and justice slipping through our fingers. The movement of information - the scene with three different police departments trying to coordinate their info over the phone is beautiful, and also an excellent demonstration of why so many of these cases go cold. Endless stacks of dusty files and ruinous piles of information exist in our modern world, and if someone came along and put them all together in every possible permutation, we could figure out just about anything. But that just will not happen, no matter how hard the Robert Graysmiths of the world try. People forget, stop caring, get old, details fade, time marches on, new events happen, sentences continue, periods end them, scenes fade into black and pass into nothingness. As cruel as it is, it's undeniably a hell of a good yarn. Even if you know the details of the case, the way Angus Wall's editing navigates each new development has you watching with bated breath, and while this review would grow unforgivably long if I talked at length about why I love Fincher and Savides' visuals, I'll just say that there's no more unsettling and fitting atmosphere for a mystery than the darkness-drenched streets and lovers' lanes and studios here. Maybe I should feel bad about being engrossed by these sordid rhythms. But Fincher is very right about one thing - we're all perverts, all sensationalists, all salivating for a tale of the vile. Here, he doesn't mean that in a cool pop-nihilist way like he might've in the 90s, rather just sadly lamenting that particular folly of man. Through the film's flurry of information, there's the desire of all our characters to have it correlate, fall into place in a neat way. In one sense, that’s just because they want justice, but it’s also because we love a good story, and once we get the setup we want - a murder in the night, a mysterious phone call, a media circus - we think it should follow the fashion of the kind of yarn we're treating it as. Setup begets clear development, which begets climax, which begets resolution. We look for patterns in the rubble, any vector that can lead us there; when it doesn't pan, it's like bad writing. "You almost look disappointed." Slowly, the desire to move that story along becomes an obsession. Who better to depict that kind of obsession than Fincher, that most meticulous of directors; he who is even a bit guilty, through his self-consciously kewl 90s movies (which I like, though not remotely as much as this), of making these dark corners of human nature sexy and cinematic and cool. This idea is emphasized by David Shire's score; he largely sticks to simple, ominous, amazingly effective sheets of strings accented by noir-esque horns and piano - the soundtrack to the film the characters think they're in, peeking almost inappropriately through the static harshness of reality. The hard-boiled cop, the tenacious reporter, the upstanding citizen. Noir is not a genre famous for tidy conclusions; you often leave those films fraught with existential dread, the knowledge that evil will go unpunished. But at least its protagonists often get to display some heroism or gallantry along the way, in some fashion - at least the source of the evil is usually uncovered, if not brought to justice. The characters in Zodiac get nothing but wasted lives and dead ends, either self-destructing or following their hunches until they get close enough, but never sure, and call it done just so they can get back to living. The only tangible thing to come from any of it is an airport paperback. The structure is a bit strange, which I thought was a problem until I realized how well it mirrors the case as a whole. For the first 100 minutes, we focus on a top-down view of the investigation; Gyllenhaal gets the most interiority, but by screentime, you'd probably think Ruffalo's Dave Toschi is the main character. We start out with much momentum, murder after murder and the according investigations in between, progress seeming to be made. Toschi and co. are more than competent detectives - the thing that sets this apart among other "smart people doing smart things" movies is the fact that they fail, and we know all along that they will. We trust that if it could be figured out, they would; but it doesn't matter how good a detective you are, sometimes the right threads just aren't there. They find leads, they twist and turn into dead ends, their lives corrode; finally, on the perfect note of the Dirty Harry premiere (where Toschi is forced to confront exactly who he is not, for better and for worse) things die off. People move on. With an hour or so to go, we jump ahead four years or so, and Gyllenhaal emerges as our clear main character, the rest of the film focusing on his investigation and his only, the only people helping him those who are unlucky enough to be drawn into it by him, nobody by their own volition, as if they're being dragged back into a bad dream. Much like the Zodiac's puzzle being more effective because it was made by an amateur rather than an expert, Graysmith's investigation is more effective done by a private citizen than an authority figure; one who can traverse jurisdictions and information freely, and be judge jury and executioner in his own mind, the only thing that matters to him; the only place where this all has to make sense. The real answer is blowin' in the wind. A masterpiece.