With a few exceptions (Kill Bill Vol. 1, The Departed, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen and A Christmas Tale), it was not a decade of bravura gestures but one of melancholy and quietly ruminative passages of time, from Eastwood’s World War II diptych and Million Dollar Baby to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Wes Anderson’s bittersweet comic wonders. And, of course, Fincher’s film “that feels like being trapped in a filing cabinet.” My favorite film of the decade is disturbing to be sure, and keenly haunting, but I have to admit that I also find it invigorating and, in the end, hopeful: Zodiac addresses the abandonment over time of the dream of absolute certainty — in this case, the hope of catching the killer red-handed — and envisions a more realistic course of dogged pursuit capped by an outcome of high probability but ultimate inconclusiveness. Somehow, Fincher’s film illuminates the way to the threshold where idle musing comes to an end, and the inauguration of a newer, necessarily pragmatic outlook begins.
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