The nit is that Chloe Sevigny's storyline is not served well, which all agree on; it may even be accurate to a wife Graysmith did not pay enough attention to, and a Wikipedia check confirms he married Melanie and they divorced in 1980, but it is unfortunate that it plays out that way in every Fincher movie.
The only casting what-if with any internet leftovers is Melvin Belli: Gary Oldman was supposed to play the role, and Fincher passed because he lacked the girth to play Belli, which lands oddly now that Oldman is playing Winston Churchill in all his girth in Darkest Hour; the hosts ask why a director who can add blood splatter could not add a few pounds, doubt anyone cares whether Belli weighed 250 or 175, and joke that human body fat is as sacred to Fincher as oak trees.
A side question asks whether Andrew Garfield, a little more of a boy scout, would have been a better Graysmith had the film been made five years later; Eisenberg is floated and rejected, and Gyllenhaal is called alarmingly handsome despite the wide-eyed look, as is Garfield.
Asked whether the film still works with a huge star like Anthony Hopkins as Arthur, the answer is not as well: it has to be a face whose physical presence unsettles because you feel you could have seen him without knowing why, since viewers bring previous films into the room and would read a famous actor as an important part, and the only place to remember Lynch is Fargo, where Norm is a completely different, friendly disposition.
For Gyllenhaal this is definitely not Apex Mountain; Enemy is offered, an incredible performance even though twin movies are usually bad and that one is triply complex, and Prisoners, with Detective Loki a series of choices; the things disliked in his early performances have become something he steered into, he works hard and made himself a better and more interesting actor, going from hiding the seams to embracing them, with this film perhaps the bridge.
A joke nominates Source Code; otherwise everything after this is found better: Stronger, which came and went this year, is a really difficult performance in a familiar story that did not get the praise it was due, and he is consistently excellent now, so despite the affectations this is a great turning point.
The case that this is Downey's Apex Mountain: people who know him only as a global superstar and brand in the last decade don't know the golden child who couldn't get it done, spoken of in hushed tones as the most talented actor of his generation yet undone by demons and addictions until a turning point around 2004 to 2006; Fincher caught him off Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, another one high on the list, and this film marries the electric comet-in-the-sky quality with a gravity that was sluiced away as he became more of a comic-book figure; Good Night and Good Luck was solid and controlled, but nothing around this suggested he could put together so mannered a performance.
Downey's 80s run is called underrated, with Less Than Zero and The Pickup Artist, and his late-90s slide read as a tragedy because he had been consistently fascinating when used correctly, as in Soap Dish (as transcribed) and Wonder Boys, a film ready to be rediscovered; weighing the larger success arc, this fits perfectly as Apex Mountain for one host, with the global franchise-head apex coming a year later.
Ruffalo is the biggest takeaway of the rewatch and perfectly cast: the Dave Toski (as transcribed) myth, the real cop who was Bullitt and partly the basis of Dirty Harry and perhaps the most recreated real-life cop ever, is played far more subtly than in the other Zodiac films, with the voice and accent right on, the floppy bow tie, pants and trench coat, and a softness that is a radical choice for a superstar murder police who literally asks about due process and is shown to be a grunt doing phone work.
The vulnerable moment when Toski (as transcribed) is accused of writing the last Zodiac letter and gets a call at his house from Graysmith is loved: his wife, played by June Diane Raphael, is outraged on the phone, and Ruffalo delicately takes the phone from her, hangs it up and walks away without a word, jazz playing, in a bathrobe; but it is not his Apex Mountain, since You Can Count On Me is hard to top as where many first saw him.
Collateral is still a thing for some among Ruffalo's cop performances; he was recommended to Fincher by Jennifer Aniston, who had liked him in Rumor Has It, the quasi-sequel to The Graduate, and Fincher liked him in Collateral.
Asked whether this is Fincher's Apex Mountain, the answer is that it is his greatest accomplishment but not his best movie: Fight Club and Seven are iconic and stitched into people's lives, The Social Network is his best and the one liked most, but Zodiac clearly took the most to achieve, is his most personal and therefore most interesting film, though it will never be as beloved.
Oak trees were helicoptered in for the Lake Berryessa murder scene; all the gore was added with CGI because repeated takes made fake blood impractical; the film was shot digitally apart from the opening sequence; James Ellroy called the three lead performances inadequate yet the film great; Downey left jars of urine on set to protest the long hours
When the crew arrived to shoot the lake murder scene in Napa the oak trees were no longer there, so Fincher had oak trees flown in by helicopter and temporarily planted with water to keep them alive for the shot; the hosts joke about the trees flying commercial to Santa Rosa next to Groot.
Fincher used CGI for everything gory because with so many takes fake blood would have meant wiping down the set each time, so for the taxicab murder he could shoot a hundred takes of Mark Ruffalo unlocking a door and add the blood splatter later; the opening sequence was shot on film and the rest digitally, edited on an Avid rig, and much of the tangible period feel the hosts admire is actually post-production.
James Elroy (as transcribed), whose Black Dahlia Fincher was going to direct before Brian De Palma did, is quoted finding it most interesting that Gyllenhaal, Downey and Ruffalo are miserable in the film, three inadequate and unconvincing performances he does not believe a word of, and that it is still a great movie; the hosts observe he is in harmony with Andy Greenwald.
An earlier research aside on Fincher's methods: Downey reportedly left jars of urine around the set to protest the long hours and decided to give Fincher what he wanted because he understands gulags; Gyllenhaal is quoted on takes running from five to ninety plus reshoots that left him asking where the risk was; Fincher's reply was that he is not interested in earnestness, the thing he hates most in acting, and that about fifteen takes gets actors out of it.
Asked whether the emotionally unsatisfying ending has aged worst, the answer is that the ending is gutsy: it leaves you feeling Arthur Lee Allen is the Zodiac, which drew criticism in 2007 because that is not the commonly held belief, but the film deserves credit for saying who James Vanderbilt and Fincher think it was; the making of the film was Fincher, Vanderbilt and others investigating the crime from Graysmith's text, with Graysmith involved and doing press runs with Gyllenhaal, and Fincher, who grew up in Marin County, has called the Zodiac the ultimate boogeyman of his childhood.
On whether it is a personal film: Fincher is said to have a perverted sense of the personal, so anything sick and any compulsion to solve things is personal to him; his anecdote about the school threat, a police escort for his bus home and his father knowing yet not picking the children up is reflected later in the film's line to a father who works from home.
Fincher's rumored next project, World War Z II, is seen as the kind of thing artists of his stature now do to remain artists of his stature, though he started with Alien 3 and has always interacted with the mainstream; it is nice to have this oddball film in the middle of his catalog, about the frustrations of an obsessive creative mind, the madness of chasing something you care about and the inability to predict success, with a cartoonist who ends up at a gun range as an analogy for wanting to make movies and working in Hollywood.
The two things that aged worst have nothing to do with quality: that this film, a $65 million movie supposedly made as an Oscar movie, got made at all, and that it was not nominated for a single Oscar in a historic year full of downer films, when No Country won Best Picture.
Recording around Thanksgiving while Ridley Scott is reshooting a swath of All the Money in the World to replace a major performance five weeks before release, a thought experiment puts Scott in the editing room on Zodiac for the 2006 Oscar push: he would have cut it around one of the three main characters and made the date, where Fincher's obsessiveness is why it came out in 2007 and not 2006.
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
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 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.
The category is framed as hard for this film, so the nominees mix lighter and darker scenes: the cold open first murder, called one of the crowning achievements of Fincher's career; the credit sequence that sets up the world with economy and panache, and the trolley of mail carrying the first Zodiac letter into the Chronicle as one of the only set pieces outside the murders; the Graysmith-Avery bar scene with the Aqua Velva; the Napa murder; the 'This is the Zodiac speaking' call with Melvin; the talk-show sequence; and the 'I am not the Zodiac' interrogation.
One vote and one honorable mention are offered: the honorable mention is the late scene where Graysmith lays out that Darlene Farron (as transcribed) worked at the Vallejo House of Pancakes less than fifty yards door to door from Arthur Lee Allen's mother's basement on Fresno Street, the only real 'we solved it' moment apart from the questioning of Allen; that interrogation in a factory break room, with Allen volunteering that the bloody knives in his car came from a chicken he killed for dinner and the three detectives silently registering his watch, is called spectacular and put at the top of that list.
The Napa lake murder is named the least rewatchable and maybe the best scene in the film: expertly done, horrifying in a slow-burning way, one of the most unsettling murder scenes, with the killer slipping behind a tree before you really see him approach; it is likened to the bear-suit figure in The Shining as an incongruous presence where sunny tourist-area safety is assumed, and the film is called a protracted tease with very little violence that hits harder when it comes.
The projectionist's-house scene near the end, when Graysmith goes down into the basement and the man pulls the chain to turn off the light before Graysmith scurries out, is called the scariest and most horror-movie moment of the film, almost Wes Craven; it arrives when the film seems to have let the audience go, and Graysmith then gets home to find his family gone.
Interrogation is stated as a pick; the final stated pick is the Graysmith-Avery bar scene, because the character interactions elevate the film beyond a phenomenal procedural: the exchange about Graysmith having just guessed that another message would come and the Aqua Velva, Graysmith on the line of being in on the joke and happy to be included, and the newspapermen cutting out at three o'clock to drink and smoke at Morty's, which rings true to a host whose father worked in newspapers.
