Date Night: Zodiac

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from Netflix.

I honestly have no idea why I waited so long to watch Zodiac.  I've wanted to see it since it hit theaters in 2007 as the next big film from the director of Fight Club and Se7en.  I didn't watch it in 2008 after Robert Downey Jr. returned to the A-list in Iron Man.  I didn't watch it after blind-buying it in 2009, nor after Mark Ruffalo became a household name in the wake of The Avengers' unprecedented success.  I waited until it was streamable on Netflix, and even then I waited over a year before I sat down to watch it.

Zodiac, based on Robert Graysmith's 1986 novel, opens during the Zodiac Killer's murder spree across 1960's California.  While San Fransisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery's coverage of the murders puts him at odds with homicide detectives Dave Toschi and William Armstrong, anti-social cartoonist Robert Graysmith becomes just as fascinated with the killer's reign of terror as he is horrified by it.  When victims stop piling up in the early 1970's, however, the public loses interest; Paul Avery is fired from the Chronicle, detective Armstrong transfers out of homicide and Detective Toschi moves on to other cases.  Despite the incredulity of the police and the concern of his wife, Robert Graysmith launches his own private investigation into the murders to uncover the identity of the Zodiac.

Rightly praised for its accurate recreation of the investigation surrounding the murders, Zodiac plays out more like a History Channel dramatization than a thriller built around a real-life Hannibal Lecter.  The characters are used less for their dramatic interactions as they are for their reactions to what the unseen antagonist does.  Greysmith's son seems to only be included because of the killer writing to the newspaper that "school children make nice targets.  I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.  Just shoot out the front tire [and] then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out."  Avery has a wife that briefly speaks from the other end of a telephone and is only mentioned again after she kicks him out of the house (presumably because of Avery's increasingly antagonistic and erratic behavior towards the police investigation).  Toschi's wife exists purely to be annoyed when Graysmith wakes her and her husband up in the middle of the night with another Zodiac theory while Graysmith's wife only seems to exist to steal their kids away to her mother's as Graysmith becomes more and more obsessed with the identity of the Zodiac killer.

Paul Avery (left) and Robert Graysmith (right)

Coming in at over two and one half hours, Zodiac's methodical pacing causes the film to drag where similar films seem to fly by.  The decision to cover the whole of the Zodiac's twisting investigation over three counties and two decades, though admirable, makes for a cumbersome and unwieldy film.  Given how superfluous Graysmith's inclusion is in the first half of the film and how equally superfluous Avery's inclusion is in the second half, the film as a whole would have strongly benefited from cutting one or the other character out entirely: focusing on a single one of their investigations alongside Toschi's.  This would have allowed the film to more thoroughly explore the unfolding drama of the lives of those effected by the murders in a more-efficient 2 hour run-time: more than enough time to explore the details of an unsolved serial killing.

Although well-written, well-acted and well-directed, Zodiac is a film that is far less than the sum of its parts.  Its sole concern with solving the mystery of the killer fails to allow it to delve into the lives of those that he affects: the surviving victims and terrified families worried that their children will be used for target practice on their way to school.  Although ambitious, it's ultimately average.  I give the film a solid 7, while Becky gives it a 6.

The banality of evil: the alleged Zodiac killer.