50 Days 50 Films - #15 "Zodiac" (David Fincher)

People always give me a quizzical look when I tell them that "Zodiac" is my favorite David Fincher movie.

I guess "Se7en" would be the obvious choice, or maybe "Fight Club." And, for sure, those are two bonafide classics from one of my favorite eras of modern filmmaking. "Zodiac," on the other hand, dropped during the dog days of 2007 and sort of vanished without a trace. Those who noticed it at all were left scratching their heads.

This is not "Se7en Part 2," which I think people were sort of expecting when they heard Fincher was doing a movie about the Zodiac Killer. Rather, it's a very stately 1970s-style procedural and newspaper movie — not a genre that, in this day and age, is really poised for box office gold.

I had already read Robert Graysmith's book (upon which Fincher's film is partially based) so I had an idea of what I was going to get. And the movie basically delivered exactly that.

You need to understand that I was a journalism major in college, and I — like a lot of erstwhile journalism majors — was drawn toward the profession because of the mythology established by such films as "Ace in the Hole," "The Paper" — and of course "All the President's Men," which loomed large over all the others. There was something impossibly romantic about the whole thing — the clatter of typewriters, the constant ringing of phones, the grizzled editors barking orders out of glassed-in office doorways, the men in rumpled suits who chain smoked and talked fast, the women in pumps and red lipstick who, er, chain smoked and talked fast. The cynicism. The snark.

It didn't take me long to figure out that the reality was far afield from the fantasy, but even now the notion has its hold on me. And "Zodiac" hits that sweet spot like no movie has in years.

I wanted a newspaper movie. I didn't need another serial killer movie.

It doesn't hurt that the actual story is endlessly fascinating (I won't go into it, because it's all right up there on Wikipedia). We do get a few murders early on. Fincher stages them expertly, eschewing most horror-movie dramatics and presenting the crimes with a flat and deadly realist eye. After that, it's all give and take between the various police departments piecing together their incomplete sets of clues, the intrepid newspaper men trying to tie it all together — and the lone cartoonist, Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) who lets his fascination with the killer and his desire to prove himself to his superiors tip over into obsession.

The Zodiac Killer has never been found (spoiler), so the film can't deliver the expected satisfaction of some sort of final showdown. Instead, we just get Graysmith stink-eyeing a likely suspect in a hardware store. Other characters simply fall away, die or move on with their lives. That's just the way things go, Fincher seems to be saying. Considering that this is a true story, that's more haunting than the head in the box from "Se7en" could ever be.