What's Your Sign?

In 2003, Bong Joon-ho directed a film called Memories of Murder about a serial killer in Korea that killed women in a rural town. Initially, the film seems very much about the simpleton village cops assigned to the case, who use violence to extract confessions. A city cop is assigned to the case and he seems far more meticulous, and it seems certain that he will eventually discover who the criminal.

The crimes took place in Korea, so most Americans do not have a historical memory of this event. Indeed, you can watch the film as fiction.

As the film progresses, you begin to discover that they aren't any closer to finding the killer, and even the city cop, so sure his superior training will discover the culprit begins to crumble when that certainty becomes far less so. His frustration causes him to resort to some of the same tactics his country cops use, and in a bit of irony, it's the country cop that must stop the city cop when he threatens someone that has been found to be innocent.

The film winds up twenty years later (the incidents occurred in the 80s) when the cop who is no longer a copy passes by the fields where the bodies were initially found, and decides to take a look. He meets with a little girl, who says that she met someone who said he was there because he had done something a long time ago. Intrigued, he asks her what he looked like. She said, he looked ordinary.

Ultimately, that film details the frustration of trying to solve murders, and really is at the heart of David Fincher's Zodiac. Set in the late 60s, the Zodiac sends puzzles and messages about the various murders he's performed.

It's mostly about the cops who try to find the killer, and Robert Graysmith, a puzzle addict and cartoonist for the local paper who becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Apparently, reality and good narrative are often at odds with one another. Ostensibly, the film is also about the struggle to find who did it, but rather than handle it like Memories of Murder, Fincher offers us a suspect, even if there's evidence to show the guy didn't do it.

Fincher was noted, like Kubrick, for taking many takes, upwards of 70. He had said the one thing he hated most was earnestness in acting. This must have been a chore working with Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr., whose now making a habit of playing substance abusing characters (see A Scanner Darkly). Pun intended.

Indeed, even though it was Gyllenhaal who complained about the numerous takes, you'd have to imagine that it was Downey who Fincher had to keep from acting too smug.

The film clocks in at two hours and forty minutes, and although it never quite feels overly long, it doesn't move at a quick clip either. It's actually fairly funny for a Fincher film, though not wild guffaws, nor even the witty bon mot. At one point, Gyllenhall (playing Robert Graysmith, who eventually wrote a book on the subject which the movie is based on) asks "Do you like it when they call you 'Shorty'?" and he replies "Do you like it when they call you 'retard'?" and he goes :They don't call me that!" and he goes "Sure.".

Fincher has a talent for inserts. To show time elapsing, he has the construction of the Transamerica building, perhaps the most well known structure outside of Golden Gate of San Francisco. This is done in time-lapsed, and clearly is an intriguing CG effect, given that it was likely they did not have any original footage. There's a scene where bits of handwriting are written as if the screen were windows. Fincher has an overhead view of a car, as it turns around, in some homage to Hitchcock.

Fincher gives us a view of the 70s that feels somewhat authentic, but without the glaring effects, like another Gyllenhaal film, Brokeback Mountain where gaudy hairstyles and remote controls tell us it's the 70s at the Texas household of his wife and her powerful affluent father.

He bookends the film with Hurdy Gurdy Man. The creepiness of this song is also used in another film that start Bryan Cox called L.I.E. about the kid of a negligent father who befriends a pederast, played by Cox. In Zodiac, Cox plays Melvin Belli, a famous lawyer of the day, who also happened to be in a Star Trek episode. This comment is thrown in offhandedly (I had thought Belli was played by Martin Landau, but then I recognized Cox's voice), and it turns out he played Gorgan in And The Children Shall Lead, one of my least favorite Star Trek episodes, noted only for the amusing name of the Chinese kid, Tsing Tao.

The lead suspect posited by Zodiac is also a pederast, so it lead me to wonder if there's anything in particular about Hurdy Gurdy Man that would make it be used in both these films. But the lyrics seem rather simplistic, and offer no deep or creepy insight.

As a narrative, Fincher has made a compelling film, but it shows that reality can often mar a narrative. Graysmith, for example, wasn't the only one who was obsessed with this mystery, but it would have been distracting to offer a second protagonist who was also engrossed by the story, even though that's what happened in reality.

For some reason, I felt that the should have had Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film. But maybe, Hoffman has been in too many films like this where he plays the baddie.

I'd rate this as a B+, intriguing for Fincher's restraint, trying to tell the story of the need to know the truth, rather than the kind of racheting doom that he's more known for (see Panic Room), and making for an interesting telling of a period of time I was unaware of ("I am not Avery"), but perhaps not as gripping as it could have been.