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Decoding ‘Zodiac’: ‘Fight Club’ director tracks serial killer’s trail

Just before Christmas 1971, Clint Eastwood unleashed San Francisco police Inspector Harry Callahan on an unsuspecting world in the classic “Dirty Harry,” in which the hero chased a psycho serial killer who called himself Scorpio.

The film was loosely based on a real-life drama still fresh in the mind of Californians: the infamous Zodiac, who murdered five known victims between December 1968 and October 1969 and then taunted the police for years in cryptic letters.

Unlike “Dirty Harry,” in which Clint bagged his quarry in typically dramatic fashion, the Zodiac murders were never solved — and the frustrating case eventually consumed the lives of some of the people who tried to crack it.

Director David Fincher serves up a gripping, lightly fictionalized account of that chase in “Zodiac,” adapted from the bestselling book by one of the central players in the saga, San Francisco Chronicle staffer Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal).

The film’s early scenes feature two of Zodiac’s attacks, shown in brutal but not gratuitous fashion. The first is on a young couple parked on a lovers’ lane, with hints that the young woman knew the killer — a plot point that figures prominently later.

When someone claiming to be the killer begins sending letters to Bay Area newspapers, along with ciphers dropping hints to his identity and motives, a new media star is born, and soon the city is in the grip of Zodiac fever.

Graysmith — an editorial cartoonist at the time — manages to decode the cipher and its allusions to “The Most Dangerous Game,” the short story and film about hunting humans.

This earns him grudging respect from Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), the Chronicle’s slightly dandified crime reporter who was all over the story.

As the frenzy gathers steam, the police enter the fray, led by SFPD homicide inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

One suspect moves to the fore: bald, hulking, creepy Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), who lost a teaching job for inappropriately “touching” children. But all the evidence is highly circumstantial, so the search goes on — fruitlessly — as months stretch into years (the narrative carries across the Millennium).

Avery, an addictive personality to begin with, eventually ends up a broken husk — due in no small part, the film infers, to the Zodiac case. Armstrong gets worn down and eventually quits homicide, while Toschi is put through the wringer by Internal Affairs on wrongful suspicion of having written one of the Zodiac letters himself.

The only one who keeps on is Graysmith, who pays his own price when he becomes so wrapped up in the Zodiac saga that his wife (Chloe Sevigny) leaves him.

James Vanderbilt, who adapted Graysmith’s book, crafts an intelligent, nuanced script with linear, rat-a-tat pacing that nimbly reflects its journalistic milieu.

And the ensemble cast, which also includes Brian Cox as famed lawyer Melvin Belli and Donal Logue and Elias Koteas as cops in other jurisdictions near San Fran, is positively sublime — a roster of highly talented actors, but none of them so high up the A-list that they bigfoot the party.

Fincher keeps the story moving with barely a pause for breath, capped by an edge-of-your-seat encounter between Graysmith and a creepy former associate of Allen’s (Charles Fleischer).

In fact, the film’s only flaw is the same one afflicting so many flicks these days: at well more than 2½ hours, it’s simply too long.

That aside, “Zodiac” — whose closing-credits sequence leaves you marveling at the vagaries of fate — is a taut little lesson on the nature of obsession ... on both sides of the good-evil divide.

3 ½ stars. Rated R for graphic violence, language.

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