"This film is based on actual case files."
Most of the problems with David Fincher's Zodiac can be traced back to that sentence, which opens the film. Zodiac is the story of the investigation into the "Zodiac killer" who operated in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The problem, however, is that having made the decision to be fairly factual with the case, Fincher is left with a standard police procedural story that wouldn't look too out of place on evening television. And as with real life, people fade in and out of the story. We are presented with four principle characters, two detectives and two journalists, but their narratives are insuficiently interlaced. It's almost as if two different films had been made and then cut together.
The attempt to stick to facts means that Fincher is unable to play to one of his strengths, the psychological aspects of the investigation. It's fairly obvious that Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a fairly creepy and obsessed individual, but, perhaps because the screenplay is based on Graysmith's book, this is glossed over, often being presented in comic terms.
Further problems are brought in when Fincher attempts to make the story more "Hollywood" bu introducing some standard thriller elements, which appear far-fetched and melodramatic.
The films strength is perhaps in giving a sense of time and place, with the fashions and soundtrack envoking the 1970s without descending into the over-the-top cliche version of the decade that we see all too often.
Overall, Zodiac isn't a bad film, it's just a solid, by-the-numbers film, but that's a disapointment, given the director and the subject matter.
2 comments:
I was surprised when I heard they were making a film about the case. It just didn't seem like it would be possible to make it work. A documentary woulod be interesting, or a thriller based on it, but combining the two probably was a mistake from the offing.
I originally read about Zodiac when doing research for features for the magazine I worked for in Beijing. In the end, I decided that while the readers probably would like it (largely 20something female office workers - they seemed to go for that kind of thing), the censors wouldn't. I can see why people get so into it, though.
A few years back a saw a Korean film called "Memories of Murder" which covers similar ground (and is even based on a real case). While I don't know how accurate it was, it worked much better as a film for me. And I suspect that Fincher had seen it before he made "Zodiac".
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