Movies to Study: Zodiac

The first movie in my official Movies to Study column will be the 2007 movie Zodiac. As always, be warned that a decent amount of spoilers will be ahead. But probably not enough to ruin the experience for you, just enough to get my point across.

We shall begin here with the director, David Fincher, who has also directed Fight Club, Seven, and Panic Room, all of which are good, if not great movies. But where Fight Club lacked in motif, and Panic Room lacked in ethos, Zodiac manages to encompass all of these criteria. The movie clocks in at 158 minutes and is split into two very distinctive halves. The first half is spent showing the murders, victims, and suspects hinting at the identity of the Zodiac. Yet when we arrive at the second half, the story focuses on Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his obsession over finding out the identity of the killer. Both halves are imperative to the success of the film.

The story opens vividly on July 4th, and we begin not with the first murder, but with Zodiac's first letter to the SF Chronicle. We jump right into the story, and James Vanderbilt's screenplay wastes no time giving us a punch in the ribs. We see the killings, and not only do we witness a mere shooting, but we see the Zodiac turn around, after nearly walking away, to finish the job.

The first part of the story is held together by the Zodiac's letters to the SF Chronicle, yes, but also with the actions the police take throughout the years. So we have the Zodiac, the newspapers, and the law. If any of these elements were absent the film would have failed. They serve to compliment each other, but more than anything, it gives us some grounding because when Graysmith eventually takes this into his own hands, we believe all the information he digs up and finds.

And there is so much information. Had this been a string of newspaper articles, the film could have been thirty minutes. But the way details are given in short supply (after the first few scenes) make the unfolding of the story a pleasure, despite the fact it's about multiple homicides.

In Zodiac there are many great moments, but two of the most impacting ones come close to the end of the film. The first is when suddenly, about two hours into the film, everything clicks for Graysmith. His wife/girlfriend/whatever Melanie gives him a copy of Arthur Leigh Allen's driver's license. Graysmith pounds on Inspector Toschi's door, screaming that he knows who it was. Toschi's out. He wants to beat up Graysmith for even coming near him. But in the rain, Graysmith slams the license up on the door. What follows, at the coffee shop, is a complete catch-up which seems like immense evidence against Allen. The time line, the weapons, the watch, the books, the military history, the stories, everything. But as Toschi tells him, he cannot prove this. Handwriting and fingerprints. It's both satisfying and crushing to watch this scene.

The second moment that seals the film is the end, when Graysmith visits an Ace Hardware store just to look Allen in the eye, as he said to Melanie much earlier. He wants to look at him, and just know. I've watched hundreds of movies where the bad guy goes to jail or gets killed in some way or form, simply because it is a movie, and none of those endings were as satisfying as this one. There is no arrest of the Zodiac -- the case is still supposedly open -- but we know, as does Graysmith, that Arthur Leigh Allen did it. And that's closure. That is a great story.