Psycho killer, qu'est que c'est

After weeks of having better things to do, I finally got around to seeing Zodiac this weekend. If you're expecting another Seven you'll be sorely disappointed, but Zodiac stands up as a pretty good film in it's own right. At over two and a half hours it's easy to criticize it for dragging and feeling too long, but, if anything, it feels incomplete (probably a result of the gaping holes in the facts of what actually happened). Though it starts out as a fairly standard police procedural, it digresses about halfway through the film into a Cold War paranoia picture a la The Conversation. And like The Conversation, the lack of actual resolution or fulfillment makes for a film that's ultimately more unsettling than it is affecting.

The film makes it abundantly clear why David Fincher has a reputation for being such a dick to work with (and why he's pretty much a god among filmmakers). There's no way this sort of clinical precision can possibly come from a reasonable person. The film opens with a tracking shot of a lively neighborhood street in San Francisco from the window of a passing car, and somehow Fincher manages to keep the camera completely stable and perfectly perpendicular with street, which, along with the snarling guitar lines of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" playing on the soundtrack, give it a surreal feeling, like some kind of obsessive-compulsive acid flashback. Instead of making the killer out to be some kind of immoral fiend that needs to be brought to justice, the identity and motives of the murderer become little more than a puzzle to be solved by the detectives and journalists working on the case, which is, of course, what makes the Zodiac killer such an interesting subject in the first place, while at the same time indicating a kind of cold indifference on the part of Fincher that puts him in a position that's eerily similar to that of the killer.

If nothing else, Zodiac is worth seeing just for the cast. Even though he only shows up for about half the film, Robert Downy Jr. is (of course) consistently entertaining as (surprise!) an eccentric, drug-addled journalist, and Mark Ruffalo adds some freshness to the usual veteran cop cliches. Between Donal Logue, Adam Goldberg, and Mr. Show's John Ennis, I count no less than three comedians playing completely serious characters and doing a pretty decent job at that.

Since this blog is ostensibly about music, I should also point out that the soundtrack to the film is also pretty awesome. Aside from "Hurdy Gurdy Man", which bookends the film and provides the perfect embodiment of the lost idealism theme that runs throughout, the snippets of other songs that crop up from the background are equally well-used. Lynn Anderson's "(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden" seems almost comic in its foreshadowing of a woman (played by Say Anything's Ione Skye, for those that, like me, wonder what the hell ever happened to her) getting terrorized and kidnapped by the killer, and Miles Davis's cool jazz classic "Solar" has never sounded sleazier.

In case you see the movie and you're not creeped out enough, check out this spot that Fincher did for the American Cancer Society back in the eighties. . . ewwww.