The 10 Year Rule Case Study: ZODIAC (David Fincher, 2007)

Francis Ford Coppola once said (echoing someone else who very well may have been parroting an even earlier source) that you don’t really know if a movie is good or not for about 10 years. If people are still talking, watching, debating, enjoying the movie 10 years on, it’s a pretty good bet there’s something interesting going on.

The wisdom of this has always rung in my ears. In my forty-five years round this sun, I can already look back to years where a movie was all the rage. . .even won a slew of awards. . .even won the biggest awards. . .and two or three years later nobody mentions it.

And then there are those movies that everyone said were awful when they came out. . .or misfires. . .or underwhelming, only to be re-appraised ten years on, as masterpieces.

Jean Renoir’s all-time top-tier classic The Rules of the Game famously enraged its French audience when it came out in 1939 (one audience member even lit a newspaper on fire and tried to burn down the theater). It languished in various mutilated cuts for almost 20 years until finally in the late 1950’s, two editors restored it to its basic original running time. And it’s been hailed a cinematic masterpiece ever since.

That gives you pause. You might make a movie everyone raves about only to watch it disappear with the changing times. Or-and I don’t know what’s worse-you might make a movie that bombs and is critically attacked, causing you to get no work, live in ignominy, only to have folks realize 10-20 years later, you were just ahead of everyone else and had made a masterpiece.

It’s nice to make that Lawrence of Arabia-type movie everyone realizes is a masterpiece the moment it comes out and stays a masterpiece. But. . .well luck is a fickle thing.

Which all leads me to me the fascinating case study of David Fincher’s 2007 true crime masterpiece (in my opinion) Zodiac.

Zodiac wasn’t critically abused when it came out. In fact, the notices were fairly good. But it has grown, in a way that almost has a frightening internal logic given its subject matter-into what I would put forward as one of THE great American movies of all time.

Fincher is one of our living working masters. Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network…even Gone Girl (in my opinion) have all captured something of the zeitgeist when they came out. They all pulse with Fincher’s genius with clinical cinematic style. They all burn with his corrosive insight into the endless selfishness and narcissism of a lot of human behavior.

But Zodiac. . .Zodiac may be the one movie where Fincher, in choosing to be reserved, in choosing to go for the slow burn (rather than the outwardly showy fireworks), created something so rich, so subterranean, so primally fascinating, that he even surpassed himself.

For anyone who hasn’t seen Zodiac — which stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downy Jr., and Mark Ruffalo, all at peak form (though all reportedly disgruntled with Fincher’s occasional 70 takes to get it right approach) — the story follows the real life events of the Zodiac Killer who murdered dozens in the California Bay area and all over the state in the 60’s and 70’s. He taunted police and politicians with coded letters he sent into the San Francisco Chronicle. Though police had a number of very possible suspects, they never were able to get a conviction. Chronicle cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (played by Gyllenhaal) became so obsessed with the case that he lost two marriages and twenty years to his incessant pursuit of the killer. He wrote the book upon which the movie is based.

And many folks have pointed out that Graysmith’s obsession neatly mirrors Fincher’s own cinematic obsessiveness. So that the movie becomes an obsessive work about obsession. . .yet done in a paradoxically empathetic and clear eyed way.

Zodiac is filled with some of Fincher’s best sequences. In fact, when you rewatch the movie multiple times, you begin to realize that almost every scene is a great scene. But here Fincher’s choices are so keyed in to how to tell the story that you really have to get as obsessive as the characters to notice the brilliance.

For instance, Fincher has the Zodiac Killer played by a number of different actors. And in the scenes where we witness the murders, we never fully make out the Zodiac. He’s always in shadow or hidden behind a mask. His body type and voice are always different. This is because those folks who survived their encounters with him all gave different descriptions of who he was to police.

Fincher also opts, possibly under the inspiration of All The President’s Men, a movie he reportedly loves, to really make the process the star of the movie. We see how police operate, how journalists operate, how politicians operate, how showy lawyers operate, how marriages operate, how interrogations operate…

All of this is to say that Zodiac captures something unsettlingly insightful and perceptive about America itself. About the American character. The American way of life. But it does so in a way beyond words. This written appreciation struggles to verbalize what Fincher and company accomplish in the movie. Because you absorb the achievement cinematically into your marrow on a very profound deep level below words and conscious thought.

The act of being fascinated by the movie somehow implicates you in the very thing the movie is examining.

Zodiac ultimately brings me back to the 10 year rule that inspired this piece to begin with. 15 years on, Zodiac is routinely considered Fincher’s best movie. And it’s routinely on the short list of great 21st century masterpieces with In the Mood For Love, Fury Road, Mulholland Drive, The Skin I Live In, etc.

It’s hard to think that someone as focused as Fincher had any thought at the time he was making the picture that he was making a stone cold masterpiece. He probably just focused in on what he needed to get done, what part of the story he needed to tell, on any given shooting day.

But bit by bit, shot by shot, atmospheric sequence by atmospheric sequence, he somehow wove together a fabric of dread and gossamer reflection. We see flits of ourselves in that fabric. And we somehow see even deeper than that. Through that.

It is, in the final analysis, a truly great movie.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.