David Fincher's Zodiac is a great made-in-SF story, rivaling Francis Coppola's The Conversation in its ability to convey universal truths with details that reek of here. With a sublime ensemble headed by the ever-amazing Jake Gyllenhaal, with period details from the feel of the Chronicle newsroom to a time-lapse view of the construction of the Transamerica pyramid, Fincher takes you heartbreakingly close to a once-cozy city unnerved by a truly vicious crime spree: the reign of terror, from 1969 to the mid-70s, unleashed by a sadist who called himself Zodiac. A Bay Area native, director Fincher — who's evidently still a tad pissed at his own stoic dad's reaction to Zodiac's threat to attack a school bus and pick off the kids "as they come bouncing off" — is at great pains to respect lives shattered decades ago, while wittily demonstrating how the men chasing after Zodiac were caught up by this media-savvy maniac's odd obsessions. Even the movie's tagline is spot-on: "There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer."
The grisly elements are packed into the opening hour of this first studio release shot entirely on digital. It's July 4, 1969. A teenage boy and his female date (she's behind the wheel) cruise from a crowded drive-in burger joint (with KYA on the radio) to a lonely lovers lane on the edge of Vallejo. Fincher, like Hitchcock, knows how to creep us out without excessive gore. We experience the helpless terror of the kids, get an odd feeling that the girl may know her killer, and leave the crime scene realizing that the boy has somehow survived without knowing if that means anything. Fincher seduces us into the Zodiac puzzle, elaborate coded anagram messages sent to the area's three major papers. Possible suspects multiply like rabbits, and every piece of evidence has several meanings or no meaning. Fincher then adds the casting trick of the killer played by three different actors, with John Carroll Lynch making a truly skin-crawling turn as the movie's prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen.
Zodiac belongs to the four guys whose lives were abducted in pursuit of a phantom. A nerdy Chronicle cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal), whose Zodiac books were a jumping-off point for the movie's theories, starts pestering a melting-down Chronicle police reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), who's bugging two SFPD homicide cops, David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo sheds his kooky-guy image) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).
The film has straight men "marrying" each other in pursuit of a common goal. One cop's decision to quit the case to return to his wife is made to feel like a kind of infidelity to his partner, who's still hooked. Gyllenhaal, whose powers to seduce we've tasted, is great as a guy going on a coffee-shop blind date with his future wife (Chloe Sevigny), already signaling that he's setting her up to be a neglected mistress to his true love: going eyeball-to-eyeball with Zodiac.
Zodiac is long, but Fincher spices it up with deliciously dated artifacts: boxy cars, egomaniacal personalities (Brian Cox as headline-hunting Melvin Belli), a hip city that was the center of its own universe, populated by paranoid citizens and leftover Freud-speak like "latent homosexuals."
Fincher presents plausible theories that are not rammed down our throats. Zodiac may have concocted his bizarre world of motiveless murder to hide the one crime he did own. Along the way, the movie spoofs an earlier comic-book one: the principals are trapped at the North Point Theatre watching Dirty Harry, and you suddenly realize why a Zodiac-haunted city was rooting for Clint's rogue cop to "make my day."