Real-life story of Zodiac killer · 2007-03-03 15:04
David Fincher is starting to create quite a little oeuvre for himself: a pitch-dark body of work obsessed with the problem of theodicy – the justification of the existence of evil in the world.
The real-life story of the Zodiac killer is the most Fincherian of murder mysteries: a still-unsolved string of brutal killings in California, beginning in 1969 and stretching across the next decade or more (no one really knows how many murders the Zodiac was responsible for, since he may have claimed credit for crimes he didn’t commit). An unparalleled media manipulator, the killer sent handwritten notes to the press with threats that eerily presage the faceless terrorism of our own age: Publish this coded message on the front page, the Zodiac warns in one note, or I just might wipe out a busload of schoolchildren.
Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, the newspaper cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle who turned himself into an amateur Zodiac expert, publishing two books on the murders that served as the basis for James Vanderbilt’s densely detailed script. His colleague and half-unwilling collaborator in the investigation is an alcoholic crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) Mark Ruffalo is Dave Toschi, a dogged police detective who in real life inspired both Steve McQueen’s Bullitt and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. The huge and very effective supporting cast includes Anthony Edwards as Toschi’s partner, Chloë Sevigny as Graysmith’s nerdy wife, and John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen, a creepy pedophile who’s one of the prime Zodiac suspects despite a lack of hard physical evidence.
Zodiac is long – over two and a half hours – but when it’s over, you almost wish it had gone on for another 20 minutes, just to see every end get tied up, State reports.
• The Blue Rigi to stay in England
• Bobby Brown to work at radio station
|