What’s Aged the Best?
The film's TV-like procedural breadth and its comfort with an ambiguous ending; Jake Gyllenhaal's transition into a serious actor beginning here; the obsessive period details and insert shots
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:23:40Read transcript
- For a film that feels timeless, the television quality and procedural feel is named first: it belongs with the 2007 films such as Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood that are unnaturally comfortable with ambiguity, There Will Be Blood ending on 'I'm finished' with nothing finished, Michael Clayton with a Graduate-style slow dissipation of triumph in a vehicle, No Country for Old Men likewise, and this one ending basically on a coin toss, leaving the audience with the characters' own lack of satisfaction despite the coda; that handling of expectation has aged incredibly well.
- Sociocultural reasons are offered for that mood: the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, international quagmire, uncertainty about what it means to be an American and the second term of a complicated presidency, so the art of such times runs to downers, ambiguity and unhappy endings, and it is not unusual that a writer like Cormac McCarthy became a national figure then. — Sean Fennessey
- The transition of Jake Gyllenhaal into a great American actor is said to start here. — Sean Fennessey
- The Gyllenhaal thread continues: apart from Prince of Persia a couple of years later, basically every film he has taken since Zodiac is complicated and masochistic in some way, perhaps learned from being put through the Fincher machine; this is also the film where the myth of Fincher's endless takes is born, reportedly needing 80 tries at a scene of Paul and Graysmith talking in a bar.
- Fincher is read as an expert at psychological warfare who needed every character wrung out, Graysmith in particular drained of all interest except his goal, and so made the actor do the same thing over and over; Graysmith has a teacher figure throughout, Avery or Toshi (as transcribed), whose affirmation he seeks, and they always tell him it doesn't matter or that he didn't get it.
- One host does not like the Gyllenhaal performance much and finds it not exceptional in an otherwise exceptional film, too earnest and a much bigger swing than the subtle gradations of Ruffalo and Downey, with an Eagle Scout at one point and a maniac at another and an unconvincing transition; another calls the performance the wild card, like Groff in Mindhunter, and reads Fincher breaking a performer of habits as the character is broken of his previous existence as the kind of meta-level game Fincher would want to play.
- Graysmith's arc is not a typical descent into madness: he is not a family man who loses everything, his son is the only person he can communicate with, and the Zodiac rather than Chloe Sevigny's character is the love of his life; the relationship is handled with care at first, since she finds the cartoonist at a gun range an interesting quirk but has boundaries, yet hers is the one character a host is not fond of, and it is called a Fincher problem, the woman as reality nagging the hero without ever stopping the story, like Rooney Mara in Social Network pointing things out and then getting out of the way so Facebook can start.
- The details, specifically the insert shots, are another pick: a Vimeo compilation collects them, the magnifying glasses, frayed authentic 70s stationery with a different handwriting style on every page, Ampex tape recorders and local TV equipment, much of it added digitally when the real thing was unavailable; the obsessive detail is a big reason to rewatch, noticing a watch or a hat each time.