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Unhappy Ending

A serial killer beats the cops and the press.

Mar 19, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 26 • By JOHN PODHORETZ
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Zodiac
Directed by David Fincher

Zodiac is about a failure--the failure to capture a serial killer who terrorized Northern California at the end of the 1960s and into the '70s. This is one of the most unusual true-crime movies ever made, a three-part episode of Law and Order in which the investigation takes decades and nothing ever comes to trial. It features a frightening climactic scene with an investigator menaced in a basement by a potential villain, but it turns out that the potential villain had nothing to do with the crimes. The film does finger a suspect as "the Zodiac," and yet that suspect is never brought to justice. An end title undercuts what little satisfaction Zodiac has offered by pointing out that there is no forensic evidence to support the movie's conclusion.

So why would you want to see such a movie? By all accounts, you don't. It was hammered in its first week at the box office, despite enthusiastic reviews. And that's too bad, because Zodiac is really, really good. Middlebrow critics of an earlier era used to commend films for being "thought-provoking," which was precisely the sort of mind-deadening praise that drove that sort of eat-your-spinach movie criticism out of business. But "thought-provoking" is exactly the right word to describe Zodiac, a movie that causes one to reflect on whether it's unreasonable to expect that every mystery can be solved, every crime can be punished, and justice will prevail.

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