Zodiac

To my ears "Zodiac killer" refers to the copycat serial killer who was active in NYC in the early 1990s, so I was a little confused heading into this film about the real Zodiac killer in early 1970s San Francisco. This is a movie that gets all the little things right, tons of great scenes, really deep, solid cast, good all around acting. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn't seem to decide which story they were telling. Chronolically, you get two things that are each about 65 percent of a movie -- the first is about the Zodiac investigation and how it hit a dead end around Arthur Leigh Allen. The second is about how Robert Graysmith revived interest in a de facto dead case and uncovered new evidence implicating Allen.

Thematically, it's also two films -- reflected not just in the script, but in inconsistent theme-setting music and direction. One is a dark tale of obsession in which a not-objectively-important mystery that wrecks the lives of everyone who touches it. The other is a tale of triumph, where a scrappy investigator solves the puzzle that stumped the experts. The true story, unfortunately, doesn't quite support either thing. Graysmith sold a lot of copies of his book, so his life was hardly ruined by obsession. But all he compiled was a bunch of circumstantial evidence contradicted by all the physical evidence and nobody was ever arrested.

My take, frankly, is that I wish the filmmakers had thought hard about the intrinsic problems with their true story and just . . . thrown it out and written an original screenplay that stole whatever elements of the Zodiac story they thought needed stealing. Whatever factual accuracy may or may not be present adds nothing of artistic significance to the film and real life just happens to be too messy to tell a good story here.

UPDATE: Let me also observe that it bothered me that the case for Allen's guilt seemed pretty unconvincing. A 30 year-old eyewitness identification has virtually no actual evidentiary value. The circumstantial evidence, by contrast, is compelling. The sort of thing that would make you want to do a fingerprint check -- and it exonerated him. Or some handwriting analysis -- and it exonerated him. Or a DNA test -- and it exonerated him. And it's not like Allen got off thanks to fancy defense lawyering or because the cops didn't look at him. Under the circumstances, if SFPD couldn't come up with a way to railroad the guy, he probably didn't do it.