Friday, March 30, 2007

Forbidden Hollywood: Pre-Code Classics

The Pre-Code era, running roughly between 1930 and 1934, saw American filmmaking venture into frank and sometimes scurrilous examinations of the shadier side of life. They pushed the envelope, a bit too far in fact, causing the Hays Office to finally begin enforcing the Code Hollywood had thus far managed to evade.


Turner Classic Movies sheds light on this fascinating era of film history with 'Forbidden Hollywood," a series of DVD sets collecting some of the best films of the period.


Forbidden Hollywood 1

Red-Headed Woman (1932) is a fairly wild tale, featuring Jean Harlow as a ruthless gold digger and home-wrecker who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. The film would likely go over well today in a theater with a live audience, but on video it seems to lack what many films of the early 1930s lack: a sophisticated use of sound. Without effective music and rhythmic editing, long silences between lines of dialogue appear awkward and strained.


Also included on the set is director James Whale’s version of Waterloo Bridge (1931), the story of a down-and-out showgirl in war-torn France who is forced to turn to prostitution to make ends meet. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute, a plotline the Code would later render impossible on the screen, even if she does come to a tragic end.


The film features Mae Clark and Douglass Montgomery as star-crossed lovers who find each other amid the air raids and destruction of World War I. The performances are strong and the special effects, though rudimentary, manage to lend an element of stirring if surreal tragedy to the proceedings despite the transparency of the techniques.


But the real value of this set is the inclusion of not one but two versions of Baby Face (1933), probably the most notorious and best of the Pre-Code classics. The film was released just as the Code came into full effect, and thus it was heavily edited, and for 70 years the original, uncensored version was thought lost. However, a print was finally discovered a few years ago and toured the country in theatrical release (see review, Daily Planet, May 26, 2006).


The film is one of the most gleefully salacious of the era, following Barbara Stanwyck as Lilly Powers as she sleeps her way to the top, literally floor by floor up the ranks of a New York bank.


The Turner release allows viewers to see both versions side by side, revealing that the attempts to tone down the film were more varied, more numerous and more hilariously inept than previously thought. The print that circulated last year was accompanied by a few additional scenes after the closing credits to give a sense of some of the changes made to the film, but the DVD release reveals much more. There must be more than a dozen edits in the first 20 minutes alone: excised words and lines, trimmed shots that jump awkwardly from one to the next, clumsy inserts covering other deletions. It’s like trimming every other word from a Lenny Bruce monologue, or removing all the innuendo from a Groucho Marx routine—take out a few pieces and the whole structure falls apart.


The cover labels this as the just the first volume in a series of Pre-Code releases from Turner, though no word yet as to what lies in store. The project promises to shed much-needed light on one the most fascinating eras of American filmmaking, when an industry found that its morals and mores were greatly at odds with a puritan government.


Forbidden Hollywood 2

Volume 2 starts off with two Shearer vehicles. The first, The Divorceé (1930), tells the story of a woman who responds to her husband’s infidelity with a pledge to live as a man lives, and thus begins a string of extramarital dalliances that the enforcement of the Code would crack down on in just a few years. Not for decades would women on screen be able to live and love as freely. Also featured is Shearer’s follow-up, A Free Soul (1931).


Ruth Chatterton runs an automobile factory in Female (1933), taking and casting aside lovers from her stable of employees at will and transferring them to a Canadian subsidiary if they get too attached. Eventually she meets her match, and from there things go down hill a bit in the feminism department until finally crashlanding in the end with a severe cop-out in which she transfers control of the firm to her husband while setting out on her new goal of producing as many as nine children. 


Three on a Match (1933) shows Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak as they grow from children to adults, Dvorak along the way slipping into a life of drug addiction. Humphrey Bogart plays a small role as a gangster thug. 


Last is Night Nurse (1931), a strange story in which Barbara Stanwyck and Blondell do battle with an evil chauffeur (Clark Gable) in an effort to prevent a case of child abuse. The film is a mix of brash comedy, torrid melodrama and frolicking cheesecake as numerous pretenses are found for Stanwyck and Blondell to repeatedly strip off their clothing. 


Also included is a documentary, Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood, that puts these films in historical context, sketching out the scandals that led to Hollywood’s first tepid and later strident efforts at self-censorship. 



Forbidden Hollywood 1

Red-Headed Woman (1932).

Waterloo Bridge (1931).

Baby Face (1933).


Forbidden Hollywood 2

The Divorceé (1930).

A Free Soul (1931).

Female (1933).

Three on a Match (1933).

Night Nurse (1931)

Truth and Past Collide in Grbavica: Land of My Dreams

With Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, director Jasmila Zbanic has fashioned a thoughtful and moving film about characters defined by the past while yearning to break free from it.


Esma, a single mother, works two jobs while struggling to raise her 13-year-old daughter Sara amid the ruins and wreckage of Sarajevo’s Grbavica neighborhood, an area that functioned as a death camp during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The understated photography and camerawork emphasize the battered and worn buildings and streets. Like the people who inhabit it, Grbavica is a work in progress, a neighborhood in ruins awaiting reconstruction.


Mass graves are unearthed on a seemingly regular basis, and Esma is among the survivors who venture each week to the coroner’s office in an effort to identify the remains of lost loved ones in hopes of finding closure. This is a community of survivors still stunned by the enormity of the tragedy they have suffered; they cling to the past yet are eager to move on, to make sense of what remains.


Actress Mirjana Karanovic, as Esma, has the ability to convey a wealth of emotions with just a glance. Her face is haunted and weary, struggling in vain to mask the pain and anxiety that shape her daily life. She’s not sure she can trust people, and she has even less faith in her own ability to judge them. In every interaction Esma seems to be running through myriad interpretations of every word and gesture; she is not able to simply have a conversation, but instead weighs and measures the significance of every nuance before embarking on a reaction, a reaction which isn’t natural or instinctive but rather an only partially convincing re-creation of a natural reaction.


Esma is defined by her experiences during the war, yet she keeps her painful memories bottled up, as though with the hope that by denying them she may one day come to believe they never happened. She is not in therapy; she’s not ready for that yet. She only turns up for support group meetings once a month, when government checks are doled out.


Her daughter Sara, meanwhile, has problems of her own. Luna Mijovic portrays the budding teenager as a tomboy, aggressive, moody and mean. The absence of a father and the increasing strain on her mother and thus their home life only compound her troubles. She too looks to the past to shape her identity, taking great pride in her status as the daughter of a shaheed, a war martyr, using this knowledge as both a badge of honor as well as a convenient excuse for bad behavior when she finds herself facing discipline at school. Sara’s identity depends on a past that precedes her birth, and when, eventually, doubt is cast on that narrative, she reacts swiftly and angrily.


But this very revelation, the exposure of lies devised as protection for both daughter and mother, brings with it a new and perhaps more powerful narrative of the past, one that grants the mother the overdue credit of a survivor—credit she has long denied herself—and that grants the daughter perhaps, in a curious way, an even more exalted status. For she can now take pride not in the vague tales of a long-lost heroic father, but in the everyday reality of being the strong, blossoming, fierce daughter of a living, breathing—and ultimately heroic—mother, a survivor of war and its depravities, a woman whose strength is all the more admirable and dignified for the fact that it endures.


Both women have seen their lives turned inside out not so much by tragedy as by the deceptions used to conceal that tragedy. And when a bit of truth manages to break through those barriers, they find themselves at long last on the road to recovery.



Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2005). Written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic. Starring Mirjana Karanovic and Luna Mijovic. 90 minutes. Not Rated. 

Friday, March 23, 2007

Color Me Kubrick and the Cult of Malkovich

After more than 25 years in the movie business, John Malkovich has carved out a unique niche for himself, a cinematic netherworld equal parts post-modernism and cult of personality.


His charisma has always been apparent, whether adding a dash of suave cruelty to Dangerous Liasons (1988) or mercurial menace to In the Line of Fire (1993). But it has been his more recent, more adventurous work in smaller, independent films that has firmly established his reputation as something of a maverick.


Malkovich plays the lead role in Color Me Kubrick, a small, quirky film based on true events that opens this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley. He plays Peter Conway, a con man who passed himself off for months as legendary film director Stanley Kubrick, swindling a string of star-struck victims along the way. He took money from them, slept with them, promised them roles in his films, even offered them financial backing for their own endeavors.


Director Brian Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were there as the real-life drama unfolded, the former as Kubrick’s assistant director, the latter as his personal assistant. Frewin in fact was responsible for screening the calls that started coming in from irate strangers who would have Kubrick’s head for having fleeced them in the days and weeks previous, in ramshackle bars and nightclubs and taxicabs all over London.


There are many paths that could be taken in adapting such material for the screen. The story could easily lend itself to a psychological drama about a man who seeks escape from his dreary existence by adopting the identity of a famous recluse; or a noirish melodrama of a con artist operating in seedy bars, with plenty of narrow escapes and shady intrigue; or a journalistic mystery perhaps, with reporters unraveling the sordid tale of a smooth-talking seducer taking money and favors from down-and-out would-be stars all over London.


Instead the filmmakers have opted for another approach, one that contains elements of all of the above while playing up the absurdist aspects of the story in the creation of a film that poses more questions than it answers. They have chosen to emphasize the humor and depravity of Conway’s ruse without attempting to divine the motivations behind the charade, electing to make a piece of light entertainment rather than a probing drama. They’ve taken more than a few liberties with the tale, embellishing here and there and working with Malkovich in fashioning the already eccentric Conway into a character even more flamboyant and inscrutable.


The film doesn’t present Conway as a master con artist; he’s clumsy, he gets caught now and then, and when he does escape it’s more often the result of luck rather than cunning. In fact, the character, like the real-life man, doesn’t even know much about Kubrick or his films and doesn’t bother to do much research. Instead he relies on instinct, improvising the character anew with each new situation. An interesting study could have been built upon the various incarnations of Kubrick that Conway creates: For some victims, he portrays the director as a suave sophisticate, sometimes with a British accent, sometimes with Malkovich’s own jaded purr; for others he presents Kubrick as a brash New Yorker, or an arrogant Las Vegas lounge lizard; for still others, a mild-mannered upper-crust American, weary of recognition and thus traveling under an assumed name. On a whim he decides which incarnation best suits his victim and then proceeds to soften him up, flattering him with the attention of one of the world’s best-known but least-visible film directors.


The movie is episodic and slightly discursive, never dull but often rambling. Cook and Frewin never quite manage to find the thread which could pull the whole thing together. Instead the film merely revels in Conway’s deceptions, true and otherwise, taking pleasure in the eccentricity of the man and his brazen scams and infusing them with wry comic touches. For instance, iconic musical themes from classic Kubrick films appear throughout, often providing ironic counterpoint to the action. A particularly effective example shows Conway, after a night of Kubrick-fueled deception and debauchery, stumbling downstairs from his low-rent hovel, crossing the street past the “Bleu Danube” adult shop, and tossing his dirty clothes into an open machine at the laundromat—all choreographed to the delicate strains of Johann Strauss’ On the Beautiful Blue Danube, the piece used to such great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey.


The inspired decision to cast Malkovich is the film’s saving grace, adding a whole new dimension to the proceedings. Since Being John Malkovich (1999), the actor’s image—eccentric, bemused, arrogant, slightly bored but always enigmatic and vaguely dangerous—has in a way become the subject of many of his films. Thus Cook and Frewin are able to employ the actor’s self-relexive persona as a hook on which to hang the film’s increasingly surreal episodes, bringing layers of complexity to an already strange tale. For it isn’t merely Malkovich playing Conway, but rather it is Malkovich playing “John Malkovich” playing Peter Conway playing Stanley Kubrick. And the kaleidoscopic tone becomes even more mind boggling in a scene where Malkovich-as-Malkovich-as-Conway-as-Kubrick regales dinner companions with tales of conflicts with studio management over the casting of John Malkovich in the lead for his next film.


Color Me Kubrick could have benefited from a more direct narrative, a more conventional through-line to tie together its absurdist humor and flights of eccentric fancy. Instead it relies on the cult of Malkovich, showcasing the actor’s strange mystique. It may not be a great film, but if you count yourself among the cult, it’s quite a ride.



Color Me Kubrick (2007). Directed by Brian Cook. Written by Anthony Frewin. Starring John Malkovich. 89 minutes. Not rated. 

Friday, March 9, 2007

Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man

When, in her final column, Molly Ivins called for the people to get out in the streets, bang pots and pans and raise hell, lefties all over the country responded with tributes and clarion calls to heed her message. Meanwhile, for more than six years, many of these same self-described liberals have excoriated the most accomplished and tenacious hell-raiser of them all, Public Pot-and-Pan-Banger Number One, Ralph Nader.


An Unreasonable Man, a new documentary opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley, examines the career of the controversial consumer advocate-turned-presidential candidate, giving much needed context and perspective to a lifetime of public service.


The film argues that it has almost become axiomatic, despite much evidence to the contrary, that Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election, his 19,000 votes in Florida spanning the 537-vote differential between Gore and Bush many times over. The inconvenient truth of the matter, however, is that there were 10 third-party candidates on the Florida ballot and every one of them received more than 537 votes. And nationwide, more than 10 million registered Democrats forsook Gore in favor of Bush. Meanwhile Nader, once a left-wing hero, became a pariah almost overnight, trashed by progressives for defending the very same values and truths for which they claimed to stand. Finally, Democrats could speak with one voice.


An Unreasonable Man documents the efforts, from both the right and the left, to undermine Nader and his causes, from General Motors’ blundering attempts to smear him in the 1960s as well as the more concerted and successful maneuvers by the Republican and Democratic parties to keep him from even attending, much less participating in, the presidential debates. For the most part it’s a simple and straightforward film, presenting the views of Nader’s supporters as well as his opponents, including many who once counted themselves among the former but have since joined the latter. But, even though directors Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan have ostensibly attempted to present a balanced portrait of Nader’s career with the intent of letting the viewer make his own evaluations of the man and his record, at times they tip their hand, revealing their own sympathetic views. For instance, towards the end of the film, as Nader, in an interview, gives voice to the principles that drive him, the directors find it impossible to resist the urge to back his words with a soaring, patriotic score.


But for the most part the filmmakers are able to stay in the background and simply let their subjects do the talking. And they do plenty. Journalist Eric Alterman says it’s time Nader left the country; he’s done enough damage here. Phil Donahue takes issue with those who criticized Nader for claiming in 2000 that there wasn’t a dime’s bit of difference between the two political parties; the Democrats then spent the next six years proving him right, Donahue says, caving in to the Bush administration’s every whim. Some former Nader’s Raiders say their erstwhile leader has lost his way; others consider the man an American hero.


Among the more humorous moments are the appearances of Michael Moore, a man who has made a name for himself with films in which he juxtaposes bits of footage to reveal the hypocrisy of those he targets. Here the tables are turned as we see Moore campaigning for Nader in 2000, asking his audience “If you don’t vote your conscience now, when will you start?”, then spinning 180 degrees around by 2004 to chastise those who took his advice, equating a vote for Nader as a transitory moment of pleasure that can only lead to a lifetime of pain.


One of the more fascinating dynamics that have arisen from Nader’s clash with his one-time loyalists is the pressure that has been brought to bear on the many public interest organizations he has founded. Some of these groups have found it more difficult to do their work; fundraising and outreach efforts have suffered due to the diminished reputation of their figurehead, who, in many cases, is no longer even involved with these groups. It’s ironic that former President Jimmy Carter should count himself among Nader’s critics, as a similar effect was repeated recently with the publication of Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Just as some of Nader’s colleagues feel their work has been hindered by his political campaigns, the backlash against Carter’s book led to the resignation of several Carter Center staffers who felt Carter’s decision to speak his mind on the Israel-Palestine conflict undermined the efforts of the center to continue its role as a mediator and non-partisan monitor of elections in the Middle East.


It’s an interesting question: Should one pursue one’s long-term goals even when that strategy jeopardizes one’s own short-term tactics? Both men are acting on the principle that truth always wins out, no matter the immediate consequences, and that ultimately history will rule in their favor. And both seem secure in the knowledge that their legacies, far from being tarnished by these actions, will one day be defined by them.



An Unreasonable Man (2007). Directed by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan. 122 minutes. Not rated. 

Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves

Some films carry with them the burden of their own achievements, their reputations so ingrained in the public consciousness that often those who have never seem them convince themselves they have. And when they finally do see those films the expectations can be almost insurmountable, rendering the experience underwhelming. Try explaining to the uninitiated the allure of Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, or the innovation and genius of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. For many younger viewers these films are merely overhyped relics from a pitiful, technologically challenged era.


Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is one of those films. Those seeing it for the first time, stripped of its historical and political context, may be slightly baffled, and not by its slice-of-life documentary approach, its focus on the everyday lives of common people and ultimate lack of closure. Instead, the problem stems from the fact that these techniques have become commonplace and too often employed in lesser films that only aspire to the humanity and depth of a film like Bicycle Thieves, one of the classics of Italy’s vaunted neo-realist movement.


Criterion has released the film in a new DVD edition that features a pristine transfer as well as extra features that help locate this enduring masterpiece in the cinematic pantheon.


The plot is simple: In Rome, during the aftermath of World War II, when out-of-work men roam the city like dogs, Antonio Ricci gets hired to put up posters around the city. The only requirement is that he own a bicycle. Things are looking up for him and his family for about a day or so, until his bicycle is stolen. The rest of the film largely consists of Antonio and his young son desperately scouring the city for the stolen bike.


De Sica did not embrace the neo-realist label, though this and several other of his works have come to define it. The movement began as a reaction to the rather staid environment in Italian filmmaking at the time. It was a complacent industry, modeled to an extant after the American film industry, manufacturing light escapist fantasy for the masses. The Italian film industry had been built up in the years before World War II by Mussolini as a method of shoring up the fascist narrative, but the machinery he put in place would, once the war was over, serve as a powerful means of documenting the tragic effects of that narrative.


The neo-realists’ idea was to take this unique medium and turn its gaze on the real world, to eschew manufactured sets, tidy plotlines, ornate photography and camera movements and instead simply confront everyday life. The conceit even extended to the casting, as it did in Bicycle Thieves, with De Sica hiring non-professional actors for the lead roles.


Simple touches are sprinkled throughout the film, details which may not seem especially subtle today but certainly were by the standards of most Hollywood fare of the time: The posters Antonio must plaster along the backalleys of Rome feature glamorous images of Rita Hayworth in luxuriant repose, in stark contrast to the run-down environs and egos of the main characters; and when Antonio lifts his wife to a window to peer into the headquarters of his new employer and admire the building’s relative opulence, the window is abruptly closed from within. Thus the message is clearly and effectively conveyed that the finer things in life are not to be had by these down-and-out folks, though optimism and ambition still glitter in their eyes.


Bicycle Thieves presents a moving and compassionate portrait of the working class struggling in the face of deprivation and poverty, and though the film’s reputation may precede it, at times to the point of distraction, the film’s techniques are ultimately as poignant and as timeless as its content.



Bicycle Thieves (1948). Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 89 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. Criterion Collection. $39.95. www.criterion.com. 

Friday, March 2, 2007

Killing Spree's Aftermath Takes a Toll in Zodiac

Few crime stories have captured the public imagination like the Zodiac murders that terrorized the Bay Area in the late '60s and early '70s. The case has become part of local folklore, transforming the mysterious killer who targeted couples in remote lovers’ lanes and threatened to bomb school buses into the de facto bogeyman for a generation of Bay Area children who came of age in the following decade.


Zodiac, David Fincher’s new film based on the best-selling books by former San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith, is the first of the story’s many cinematic adaptations to stay true to the facts. Previous films took liberties with the tale, embellishing, altering and simplifying the details for dramatic effect. Thus far only Fincher has had the clarity of mind to focus on the real drama of the story, which is not the depravity of the murders or the killer’s twisted mind, but the investigation itself and the toll it took on the men involved. 


In adapting Graysmith’s work, Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have focused on the strengths that constitute the enduring value of the books: that they have served as much-needed compendiums of the facts and theories which had hitherto been far flung among competing agencies in the various jurisdictions where the killer struck.


The film starts with the killer's second attack, after which he sent his first letter and cipher to the press, establishing for the first time in the public consciousness the disquieting reality that a serial killer was at work in the Bay Area. And, with the exceptions of three more scenes depicting later attacks, the film primarily consists of conversations between reporters, editors, detectives and suspects. As such, Zodiac slips into something of a pattern, one familiar from television’s ubiquitous talking head- and dateline-laden forensic dramas. Though the film is well crafted, it still lapses at times into the familiar cliches of the police procedural genre: tense discussions between a skeptical detective and an excited journalist, the latter eager to condense his insights into the “just two minutes” the former has allotted for the meeting; the late-night talks in restaurants featuring notes scrawled on napkins, with utensils positioned as makeshift maps to illustrate pet theories; and why is it that the men in these dramas are so often ravenous, taking huge bites of artery-clogging foods and chewing with their mouths open? Aren’t there any less hackneyed shorthand methods for portraying the driven, the dedicated and the self-destructive?


The actors are forced to bring their characters alive within the limited confines of the procedural genre, and only Mark Ruffalo succeeds fully. Robert Downey Jr. is charismatic and by most accounts effective in channeling the wit and energy of Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, yet he has little time to do so and limited material with which to do it, resulting in a performance that comes across as too cynical, too sarcastic, too one-dimensionally clown-like to ring true. Jake Gyllenhaal too is limited by the material, yet in his case ample screen time actually works against the performance, giving us scene after scene of him nervously jumping about like an agitated schoolboy. We are not convinced we’re witnessing a case of obsession but are instead acutely aware that we are watching an actor employ the standard theatrical devices for conveying that obsession. Again, the details of the performance may be authentic, but sometimes absolute veracity just doesn’t translate well on screen.


But Ruffalo, as San Francisco Police Inspector Dave Toschi, really hits the mark. Toschi benefited and suffered at the hands of Hollywood; Bullitt (1968) made him something of a legend, with Steve McQueen taking many details, including his unique holster, from Toschi, while Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971) maddened Toschi as the hero’s vigilante-like approach to the “Scorpio” killer only helped to increase public frustration with Toschi and the real-life manhunt that consumed the Bay Area. Here Toschi was tracking a killer who was obsessed and inspired by movies and only now have the movies finally given Toschi his due in the form of Ruffalo’s sympathetic portrayal. Ruffalo’s Toschi is brave, bright, articulate and passionate, but at the same time flawed, tormented and ultimately all too human. 


The most significant flaw of the film is its focus on Graysmith, a character who, though integral to the tale, is hardly the most compelling figure in the story. Really the main character should have been Toschi, with a late digression toward Graysmith once the official investigation had wound down, but later returning again to Toschi to show the effect Graysmith’s discoveries had on the retired inspector as new facts, theories and circumstantial evidence pointed time and again to Arthur Leigh Allen, Toschi’s favorite suspect all along. If the premise of the film, according to its publicity, is that that the men who waged the investigation and were in the end undone by it should be tallied among the killer’s victims, why is the dramatic thrust skewed toward the only character who managed to significantly benefit from the case in the form of best-selling books and Hollywood movie deals? 


For the most part, Fincher’s direction is strong enough to overcome these obstacles, managing to create a film that is stylish without being showy. He stages the murder scenes simply and for the most part accurately, and keeps the investigation scenes moving despite the static nature of the format. One shot adds a chilling but subtle flourish to the murder of San Francisco Yellow Cab driver Paul Stine: The scene opens with an overhead shot of the cab as it winds its way through the streets of the city, the camera shifting with each turn as though locked in place with the car, suggesting the care with which the killer choreographed and mapped the encounter, leading Stine on a slow death march from the theater district to the Presidio Heights neighborhood where he would be shot.


Zodiac may be the definitive celluloid incarnation of the case, one that is unlikely to be bettered, but still it encounters the same dilemma that stymied the creators of last year’s low-budget version, The Zodiac: There’s just no way to effectively conclude the film, for there is no definite conclusion to the real-life story. Once again, Fincher turns to the Graysmith character with a scene in which Gyllenhaal finally gets to look the killer in the eye. But whatever emotional impact the scene might have achieved is undermined by the fact that we, the audience, have already looked into these eyes in an earlier scene. Again, a better conclusion might have been wrung from the fates of Toschi or Avery. 


Instead the anti-climactic encounter is followed simply by the standard coda in which we read what later became of each of the characters. It is a strong film, at times even a powerful film, and its strength lies in its adherence to facts. However, veracity doesn’t necessarily make for great art. Reality is rarely obliging in that way. 



Zodiac (2007). Directed by David Fincher. Written by James Vanderbilt. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards. Rated R. 160 minutes.