I don't know. I moved onto a boat. You know we work in the daily business, right? As in, today? What do you think we were doing back then? Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, he wrote a few letters and then he faded into a footnote.

“I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying, I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you,” Fincher concluded. “Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, did we tell the story?”

Zodiac is the kind of film whose reputation exceeds itself to the extent that I've been seeing it for a long time, not because I didn't think I would love it, but because I didn't think I would get that much from it. I mistakenly thought that everything the film had to impart had seeped its way into pop culture, American filmography, and the collective zeitgeist, and therefore into me—a sort of film as microplastic. This is true of some films, but Zodiac is so much more interesting than its footprint would suggest.

I can only really talk about this movie and its depth by starting with the ending and ending with no clear moment of victory or emotional payoff—an ending that takes place 20 years after the opening scene, at which point the protagonists have either died or become disgraced. This is a deconstruction of true crime rather than a celebration of its truth. Truth is thin and scarce, and even hard truths do not meet a bar for action. Our last shot of Robert Graysmith, the obsessive cartoonist who becomes our eyes, ears, and nervous heart, is of him staring deep into who he believes to be his target's eyes. His wife has left him. His kids are gone. He has no job. If the prison scene is anything to go by, he is sure his quest is at an end. (If there's one quibble to make in Fincher's masterwork, it's that ending with a smash cut on this scene, I think, would have been even more perfect.) Graysmith is portrayed perfectly by Jake Gyllenhaal, who I hate to say I have not really enjoyed in any role until this one. There's a subtlety to his growing mania that feels somehow warmer and more realistic than in other such depictions, and the same can be said, by the way, of Chloe Sevigny in an understated and thankless role as a foil who I think plays her part perfectly.

Reading through contemporary reviews of the film, focus is drawn to Fincher's obsession with the character work and procedural work — the anti-obsession with gore and how little blood and violence is actually depicted on screen. This is true, but watching it now I feel like the strongest statement is not even with the case itself but with the world growing around the case. You don't have to believe Mark Ruffalo's half-hearted protestations that the killer doesn't matter compared to a bad traffic accident or an average Wednesday at the docks to understand that in a larger situational context. He's right—the Zodiac killings existed as a pop culture phenomenon more than a series of deaths we watch, with every member of this insanely stacked cast growing older, more disheveled, and beleaguered by the world passing them by until there is no one quite left to run everything together.

I think if there's any thesis, it's this one—sometimes in life, the accomplishment of something great requires everything to go perfectly right and perfectly in concert, and you better hope that it's worth it because otherwise 20 years is going to go by, and you have yourself a best-selling book, an empty house, the memory of someone heavily breathing on the phone, and never quite knowing how safe you are.

★★★★★