Zodiac
by William Baer - April 2, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
In the past six months, Hollywood has released two major pictures that have each dealt with one of America's two most famous unsolved criminal mysteries, both of which took place in California. Last year's The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, covered the gruesome and much-publicized murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose naked and dismembered body was discovered in a Los Angeles field on January 15, 1947. The more recent Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, focuses on the sinister serial killer who taunted the police and newspaper editors with shocking letters and cryptograms about his crimes in San Francisco and the surrounding areas beginning on August 1, 1969. De Palma's Dahlia, despite an A-list cast, was a box-office and critical disaster; Zodiac, despite its pre-release buzz, turns out to be a moderately engaging but still generally disappointing film.
The failure of both of these films highlights the fundamental difficulty of making movies about well-known unsolved crimes, and the problem, as always, begins with the script. The Black Dahlia is an adaptation from James Ellroy's novel of the same name, a highly fanciful fiction that has little interest in the real case. In the film, the murder doesn't even take place until an hour has passed, and eventually the crime is ascribed to a fictional and rather preposterous character.
In the past, fiction writers and screenwriters have often taken real-life criminal cases and modified them—as Poe did when he transformed the sensational 1841 murder case of Mary Rogers, Manhattan's "Beautiful Cigar Girl," by moving the story (and his personal speculations) to Paris for his second detective story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Similarly, Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1972), starring Clint Eastwood, used certain aspects of the Zodiac case in its portrayal of a deranged killer named "Scorpio." But Ellroy's insistence on using Short's real name and nickname ("the Black Dahlia"), along with a total disregard for the facts of the case, is both unfair to the victim and patently dishonest. Neither did it help the script—the film was one of the biggest bombs of 2006.
Zodiac, on the other hand, tries to be meticulous in its presentation of the facts surrounding the known activities of the Zodiac, the terror he induced in northern California, and the search for his identity. It's a long procedural (158 minutes), and its young screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, has packed the film with facts and details that are often intriguing but sometimes overwhelming and confusing. Nevertheless, both he and Fincher have the same problem that all filmic versions of unsolved crimes have: If the killer was never caught, how can the film have closure? While Ellroy fictionalized a ludicrous solution, Vanderbilt chooses instead to focus on one particular suspect. But even this is no guarantee for success, as can be witnessed by the many unsuccessful films that have attempted to reveal the "true" identity of Jack the Ripper.
Fincher's film begins with the Zodiac's three most famous crimes: a lovers'-lane shooting (leaving one dead); a lovers' picnic stabbing (leaving one dead, again the female); and the killing of a San Francisco cab driver. All three crimes, though certainly horrific, seem oddly lacking in tension, which is strange given Fincher's past ability to create terrifying suspense in a number of his previous films, especially Se7en (1995). During the first half of the movie, the focus is on the newsroom at the San Francisco Chronicle, particularly investigative reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and the newspaper's intrigued cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal).
