Saturday, March 10, 2007
Zodiac Club
Zodiac opens with a tracking shot from the inside of a car looking out of the passenger window while driving down a suburban street on the Fourth of July. Fireworks visible in the background, people in their yards gazing at the sky, smoking, doing just what people do on a hot summer day. A teenage boy approaches the car window. Who's in the car? Is it the killer? From the opening shot, you know you're in for a great ride.
Zodiac is quintessential David Fincher, bringing together in a true crime story the taunting serial killer from Se7en with the man-seeks-authentic-life ethos of Fight Club.
In Fight Club, Ed Norton's character worked as an insurance claims adjuster, running "the formula" on the cost-benefit of whether to order a recall for defective automobiles. For Zodiac we have Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal of Robert Graysmith, an ineffectual editorial cartoonist for a daily newspaper, hovering around the news desk of talented, hard-drinking, hard-news reporter Paul Avery (played to type by Robert Downey, Jr.). The protagonists of both Fincher films represent minor cogs in the wheel of a larger machine that profits from the threat of death, one via insurance premiums and another through fearmongering.
Where the Ed Norton character responds to his ennui by forming the fight club, Graysmith grasps for authenticity by attempting to solve the Zodiac mystery, joining the "Zodiac Club" of cops and forensic experts. Like Tyler Durden's Fight Club army, the members of Zodiac Club seek each other out, exchange knowing glances, and break rules for the cause.
Unlike Fight Club, the members of the Zodiac Club are not single, disconnected men. They have children and wives, and their wives have a lower threshhold for sacrifice in the search for justice. They want their husbands free from the Zodiac obsession and the real danger it represents. Zodiac being a dramatization of a real event, it's a much messier story with human characters having depth beyond the symbolic. However, aside from Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of police inspector David Toschi, whose Animal Cracker-fueled performance changes registers at the drop of a clue from jaded to annoying to endearing to angry to conspiratorial, the characters tend to remain in a predictably monotonic range – Gyllenhaal plays earnest, Downey Jr. does world-weary, and so on.
Why? Because the movie enlists the characters into the service of describing a larger idea, that the system is broken. Killers walk free because justice comes second to the profit motive, because the organizations entrusted with the protection of society are engulfed in internecine turf battles, and the because the human desire for ease and comfort takes priority over solving yesterday's crimes that happened to other people.
At one point, Paul Avery chides Robert Graysmith for his interest in the Zodiac case and his desire to "do something."
"What did you do? Go to the library?"
Going to the library - it's more than most people care to do under similar circumstances, but not nearly enough.
Zodiac is quintessential David Fincher, bringing together in a true crime story the taunting serial killer from Se7en with the man-seeks-authentic-life ethos of Fight Club.
In Fight Club, Ed Norton's character worked as an insurance claims adjuster, running "the formula" on the cost-benefit of whether to order a recall for defective automobiles. For Zodiac we have Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal of Robert Graysmith, an ineffectual editorial cartoonist for a daily newspaper, hovering around the news desk of talented, hard-drinking, hard-news reporter Paul Avery (played to type by Robert Downey, Jr.). The protagonists of both Fincher films represent minor cogs in the wheel of a larger machine that profits from the threat of death, one via insurance premiums and another through fearmongering.
Where the Ed Norton character responds to his ennui by forming the fight club, Graysmith grasps for authenticity by attempting to solve the Zodiac mystery, joining the "Zodiac Club" of cops and forensic experts. Like Tyler Durden's Fight Club army, the members of Zodiac Club seek each other out, exchange knowing glances, and break rules for the cause.
Unlike Fight Club, the members of the Zodiac Club are not single, disconnected men. They have children and wives, and their wives have a lower threshhold for sacrifice in the search for justice. They want their husbands free from the Zodiac obsession and the real danger it represents. Zodiac being a dramatization of a real event, it's a much messier story with human characters having depth beyond the symbolic. However, aside from Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of police inspector David Toschi, whose Animal Cracker-fueled performance changes registers at the drop of a clue from jaded to annoying to endearing to angry to conspiratorial, the characters tend to remain in a predictably monotonic range – Gyllenhaal plays earnest, Downey Jr. does world-weary, and so on.
Why? Because the movie enlists the characters into the service of describing a larger idea, that the system is broken. Killers walk free because justice comes second to the profit motive, because the organizations entrusted with the protection of society are engulfed in internecine turf battles, and the because the human desire for ease and comfort takes priority over solving yesterday's crimes that happened to other people.
At one point, Paul Avery chides Robert Graysmith for his interest in the Zodiac case and his desire to "do something."
"What did you do? Go to the library?"
Going to the library - it's more than most people care to do under similar circumstances, but not nearly enough.
Labels: movies
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