Zodiac is part brooding investigative ensemble, part journalistic procedural in the vein of All the President’s Men. Fincher’s least stylistically ambitious work to date, as well as his most mature, Zodiac is a strikingly well stitched together vivisection of crime and obsession, marked by a painstaking, novelistic richness that showcases the heavy existential toll of the pursuit of punishment.
The film’s actual violence is relatively minimal, but frontloaded and grimly depicted. Fincher captures the sudden and arbitrary nastiness of these acts, and they carry an awful wallop and enduring influence that hang menacingly over the rest of the film, which exhaustively but thrillingly chronicles the official efforts of two San Francisco homicide detectives, Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, above) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), as well as the amateur investigations of reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal).
