Men in shirtsleeves, in offices, on the phone, typing and talking: now that's what I call cinema
I knew I was going to enjoy Zodiac, which I saw at the cinema over the weekend. It's about a real life serial killer - the Zodiac, whose case remains officially unsolved, almost 40 years after his first murder, and has filled two books by Robert Graysmith - and it's set predominantly in the late 60s and 70s, when the murders took place. Now, although I find serial killers fascinating, and have read all the lurid books, firstly, I am not one, and secondly, this doesn't mean I find the dismembering of young people, which they often are, in any way titilating. In fact, I'm rather repulsed by slasher horror films, if I'm honest (reserving a soft spot for the daddies, Psycho and Halloween, obviously). The point I'm making is that what interests me about those who murder in a methodical way is their motive, their psychology, the context in which this breakdown in the moral compass occurs. I saw a terrible film about the serial killer Ted Bundy once. It was called Ted Bundy, and not only did it sidestep any tricky questions about his motivation for terrorising and killing young women, it took way too much delight in showing us Ted Bundy terrorising and killing young women. A film from the same writer, Stephen Johnston, about Ed Gein (the inspiration for Leatherface and Norman Bates), called Ed Gein, was a far more lyrical and interested attempt at the same gig, but it's a tough one. Since Silence Of The Lambs turned the serial killer into an intelligent, suave, thinking person's screen antihero, the vertical hold has gone a bit wonky in this area.

In real life, for instance, serial killers don't "copy" other serial killers (as the killer did in Copycat) or indeed stage elaborate tableaus (as the killer did in Se7en), as entertaining as those devices proved to be. Which is why a factual film about the Zodiac (albeit made by David Fincher, who helped glamourise the subject in Se7en) sounded so refreshing. I admired Spike Lee's Summer Of Sam as it used the climate of fear in New York at the time of the Son Of Sam spree as a backdrop for various other stories. But Zodiac is different again. It's almost not a serial killer movie at all, despite its armrest-manhandling opening sequence depicting Zodiac's second double-murder of a canoodling couple down some lovers' lane. What Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have done is take the murders as a mere starting point. This is a two and half hour film in which most of the screen time is taken up with men in shirts and sometimes even ties, going about their business in offices, be it the San Francisco Chronicle, where Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith and Robert Downey Jr's crime reporter trade downbeat quips as the killer's coded messages keep turning up in the editor's in-tray, or the offices of Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards' police station. Because the murders took place over five counties in California, the action, such that it is, moves about a lot, and involves a lot of phonecalls. Are you getting the picture? Not a huge amount happens beyond investigation. Perhaps four series of The Wire, with its wire taps and subpoenas and paperwork, are good training for a full enjoyment of what is a strict police (and journalistic) procedural.

I've seen mention of Alan J Pakula's All The President's Men in more than one review, and it's a perfect comparison. I can't do any better. In that, we didn't see much of the crime itself at the Watergate building, but we saw an awful lot of Woodward and Bernstein knocking on doors and typing things up and sitting around in meetings. That was a very male film. So is Zodiac. Chloe Sevigny does well with the role of Graysmith's long-suffering wife, but beyond that, it's not about women. I rather imagine this is a true picture of journalism and police work in the late 60s and 70s. Ruffalo seems a limited actor, but he's perfectly cast as the cop who became the unlikely model for Dirty Harry. It's a masterstroke to show him walking out of a screening of Dirty Harry - its own killer, Scorpio, a barely-veiled extrapolation of Zodiac, then still at large - failing to recognise himself on screen and disgusted by the fact that the case he can't crack has already been fictionalised by Hollywood. The San Francisco setting is evocatively captured, recalling Vertigo in its foggy beauty, and further allusions are made to the city in the early 70s by the soundtrack, which is by David Shire, who scored The Conversation. The same piano-led dissonance is achieved. It's a very smart back-reference. You half-expect Harry or Stan to walk into shot at Union Square.

All in all, Zodiac restores my faith that talky films can still be made in America with studio dollars. If you want gore and suspense and Hannibal Lecter, look elsewhere. The killings in this are all the more horrific and "ordinary" for their lack of sensational staging. And when all that police work and library time and phone manning finally winkle out a prime suspect (ghoulishly played by John Carroll Lynch, who I mainly know as the sacrificial rescue worker on the subway train in Volcano), and the net tightens, none of this provides a neat denouement. This is not a neat story. The final captions make that clear.

On a related note, I saw Half Nelson by Ryan Fleck the weekend before last, and there's another intelligent American film (albeit one on a budget and without marquee names), which also recalled The Wire (it's set in a high school, and even shared a couple of junior cast members). A central performance that merited its surprise Oscar nomination from Ryan Gosling, and although it was set in the here and now, it too had a grainy 70s quality. There's some kind of theme here.

Anybody else seen either of these films?

Did I mention that I'm not a serial killer? Good.