Anatomy of a Manhunt

By RICHARD CORLISS

There's no nice way to say it: movies love murderers. Producers may claim the killer's story is a cautionary tale, but they revel--along with the villain and the audience--in the sick grandeur of a hit man, a supervillain, a serial killer. Movies used to show what the audience wanted to be. Then Norman Bates came along, and Freddy and Jason, and Hannibal Lecter, to prove that we also wanted to see what we feared. The psycho creeps toward his victim; we can't watch, and we can't turn away.

Zodiac, a true-crime docudrama from scaremeister David (Se7en) Fincher, is about the manhunt for a killer who raised shivers throughout California from 1969 to 1978. He murdered at least five people and maybe many more. Or perhaps other disturbed souls copied his style. Often imitated, never duplicated, Zodiac was the Elvis of serial killers: he had brains, swagger, originality and a flawless sense of p.r. He taunted police and the press with phone calls, coded messages, swatches of his victims' clothes. Bay Area detectives questioned several suspects, but the killer was never caught. In what may have been his last note to the San Francisco Chronicle, he mused, "I am waiting for a good movie about me. Who will play me."

"Good movie"--that's rich. Zodiac must have been a film critic, for by 1978, there had been plenty of movies inspired by his exploits. Apparently, he didn't care for the two released in 1971: a no-budgeter called The Zodiac Killer, and Dirty Harry, with Clint Eastwood as a Frisco cop chasing a serial killer called Scorpio. Other films followed; the methodical (read: plodding) The Zodiac came out in 2005. But if the killer was hoping for a synoptic rethinking of his case from an A-level director, he's finally got it.

Based on a book by onetime Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, the film is less a serial-killer thriller than an All the President's Men wannabe, with the young Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Woodward and Bernstein, and his senior colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) as a crusty Ben Bradlee type with a lot more showmanship and a mile-wide self-destructive streak. Their sleuthing sometimes helps, mostly annoys detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). When Toschi is asked, "Have you considered that the killer might be Paul Avery?", he deadpans, "Frequently."

That's about the only spot of humor in the script, by James Vanderbilt, whose widely circulated screenplay of Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies--yet to be made--is a model of compression and clarity. This one, with two main story lines (Toschi's official pursuit and Graysmith's amateur obsession) plus a character count in the high dozens and lots of leads that go nowhere, right up to the end, is necessarily a more sprawling affair. Yet it manages to be true to the complexity of the case while never losing cohesion or coherence.

Fincher, whose work on Fight Club and Panic Room displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing: Ruffalo emitting just a whisper of rage under his just-the-facts-ma'am demeanor; Downey playing the chatty, suicidal genius (the actor's line readings always have a jazzman's musical ingenuity); and Gyllenhaal in his winsome mode, looking like a puppy who just got swatted with a newspaper by the master he somehow still adores. The star quality has to carry the movie, all 2 1/2 hours of it, since Fincher assumes that audiences will be fascinated by the minutiae of police work while they get only a few face-on glimpses of the man Graysmith believes is the killer: Arthur Leigh Allen.

He is played by John Carroll Lynch, who was the homicidal Varlyn Stroud on HBO's Carniv`ale. Deep into the movie, Allen is questioned by Toschi and Armstrong, and suddenly Zodiac forgets its vibe of a CSI: SF episode at miniseries length and gives us a high-voltage face-off with unearthly evil.

Or is it just Allen's serpentine poise as the officers quiz him that seems inhuman? You might crack if you were confronted with mounds of damning, if circumstantial, evidence. But Allen parries each thrust or shrugs it off, never taking their bait, meeting their suspicions with his steely stare. You'll feel a chill in the theater, and in your blood, for it's here that Zodiac becomes the good movie the real killer was waiting for. And no one could play him better than Lynch.

The scene doesn't prove that Allen is Zodiac. (Neither, conclusively, does the film.) But it does suggest that psychosis has a kind of charnel charisma--that murderous evil is the majesty of the depraved.