Zodiac (2007)

The first time I watched Zodiac, the ending made me furious.

Furious, because I’d spent two and a half hours watching the evidence line up against Arthur Leigh Allen, and then I got absolutely blueballed by Leigh having a fucking heart attack. A title card tells you he died before anyone could charge him, and the next one tells you a DNA test didn’t match him anyway. No justice. I rewatched it this week, and that ending is now my favorite thing about it.

David Fincher had already made his serial killer movie. In Se7en, John Doe calls every shot, wins, and hands everyone an answer in a box. Zodiac refuses to hand over any answer at all, and it barely seems interested in its killer. It’s a process movie: handwriting samples, cipher pages, phone calls between police departments in three counties that can’t get each other the files. For most of the runtime the tension is a low hum of paperwork, and then in the last stretch it’s really cooking.

What Fincher cares about is the people the case impacted, and what it does to the ones who can’t put it down.

Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a Chronicle cartoonist who gets hooked on the Zodiac ciphers and is still hooked more than a decade later. Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) gives it a decade and ends up accused of forging a Zodiac letter himself. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), the paper’s crime reporter, drinks himself out of the story. Graysmith’s wife Melanie watches her husband disappear into boxes of case files until she takes the kids and leaves. Nobody in this part of the story gets stabbed or shot, but all of them lose years to it.

So the heart attack hits differently on a rewatch, because there was never a verdict coming. The movie is about what wanting one does to people, and Graysmith wants it more than anyone.

The first time, I wanted the movie to catch him. This time I was watching the people who couldn’t stop trying, and God, I love that ending.

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