Thanks, I Hate It: Zodiac

They're watching Zodiac on the set of Zodiac.

I don't like Jake Gyllenhaal, who looks at all times like he's reciting "acting, acting, acting" in his head as he says his lines. I also don't like David Fincher, a man with the emotional depth of an earwig. I thought perhaps in combination that Gyllenhaal's wide-eyed staring and Fincher's clinical, antiseptic style would result in something interesting, some blank and deeply vacant caricature of humanity that might give Fincher the chance to say something about America. Alas.

 Zodiac is a movie about the infamous Zodiac killings, but it offers neither insight nor a tantalizing whiff of the unknown. Instead it walks through the case's investigation, reporting, and actual crimes as though they're a series of Brechtian theater pieces, cold and hostile, actively avoiding emotional connection to the audience. It makes characters like Mark Ruffalo's glib, sandwich-scarfing investigator feel like Loony Toons in the middle of Charles Burns' Black Hole. The dissonance is absolutely wild. Impossible to reconcile.

If Fincher was trying to tell a good crime story, he blew it. John Carroll Lynch is truly one of the greats, and he does what he can with a small and thankless role as the most likely suspect for the killings, but there's no pace to any of it. No pulse. It's just men walking around having lifeless conversations with other men. Gyllenhaal's empty expression and slightly slack mouth don't so much make him believable as an oddball reporter as erase him from your memory as soon as he's off screen. His character seems to be "awkward, has wife." I think his life and his obsession are meant to be the thing around which the film congeals, but they're utterly missable and bland. 

If you make a movie about serial killers, you ought to touch on the societies that shape them and the emotions that drive them. Failing that, make it stylish. Find meaning in the shape and color and human motion of it. Fincher has no gift for any of this. His dedication to realism is all-consuming, his understanding of the objective reality he worships paper-thin and untextured. Zodiac is a movie about nothing and for no one.