Movies: Zodiac

Way better than Se7en, not as brilliant as Fight Club, but still a damn fine movie, Zodiac starts as a make-you-whimper, lets you off the hook awhile, and then makes you whimper a few more times before leaving you to stew in nervousness, anxiety, and delight. Excellent performances all around, particularly from Mark Ruffalo (who finally seems to have grown up) as Toschi, a detective with a penchant for animal crackers, and even more particularly from Robert Downey Jr., as journalist Paul Avery. Jake Gyllanhaal, as cartoonist-turned-obsssionist Robert Graysmith, suits the role and is the inheritor of the bug-eyed looming weird kid tradition most recently effected by Tobey Maguire. Chloe Sevigny manages to be uglier than usual.

The plot arc describes killing enough, and it is indeed brutal (particularly a stabbing at Lake Berryessa—one of the best onsceen screams I've heard ever), but the film focuses less on the killer than the obsession and ensuing breakdowns suffered by those tracking him. At one point, Graysmith shows up at a women's penitentiary to question a prisoner tangentially related to one of his leads and she looks at him sideways when he says he wants to ask her about the Zodiac. "You've got the look," she says, and it's true: he has the dark circles and three days growth that Hollywood uses again and again to convey sleeplessness and obsession (cf., most recently, Aaron Eckhart's Sgt. Lee Blanchard in The Black Dahlia).

Minus points for neglecting to age the actors properly; Robert Downey Jr. is the only one whose physique shows any sign of the decline that comes with the passage of ten then twenty years, plus extreme anxiety.

Bonus points for a perfectly on-point visual description of the Bay Area of my youth, recollections of Melvin Belli and Herb Caen, and a killer (ha ha) soundtrack.