FauxNixon

One of the most recent pictures of David Fincher was The Zodiac; a retelling of the true story of the serial killer who terrorized California during the 1960s and 1970s and whose identity was never determined.  Fincher models the telling of this tale through the lens of a political cartoonist working for a local newspaper (Jake Gyllenaal as Robert Graysmith) who is attempting to do some investigative journalism with the help of a more seasoned news veteran in Paul Avery as played by Robert Downey, Jr.  Even when the police lose interest in the case eventually, Robert Graysmith remains interested and mounts a private investigation that costs him much of his personal life in family and friends due to his almost obsessive fixation with determining the identity of the killer.  While the film’s plot drags a bit, with the amount of time it is attempting to portray in a feature-length window, unless it deviates significantly from the true-life story, that drag can’t be helped or avoided.  Fincher seems to do the best he can to tell the story, but seems to produce something that’s much more confused than his other work and as such comes across as more of a generic thriller whose best marketing feature is that it’s based upon a true story.  As a fan of David Fincher’s work I am quite hopeful that this was just a weird entry in his career and he will be back to making very good movies quite soon.