"Uh, an editorial tête-à -tête . Wanna grab a drink?" Whenever things go south on the job, I quote that line of dialogue from David Fincher's masterpiece, Zodiac (2007), which dramatizes the infamous, unsolved serial murders in Northern California in the 1970s, attributed to the Zodiac Killer. The dialogue belongs to Paul Avery, a rogue scamp of sorts, played brilliantly by Robert Downey Jr. in a performance that should be considered one of his career best. Unfortunately, we don't seem to talk enough about just how good he is in the film. So, let's, shall we? As a sarcastic, cynical, and disgraced reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Avery starts the film in a professional and personal funk, exacerbated by his being a highly functional alcoholic. Then he finds a new purpose, a path towards redemption, through the paper's political cartoonist Robert Graysmith's ( Jake Gyllenhaal) obsession with the Zodiac case. What follows is Downey and G...
we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars