Director tones down in 'Zodiac'

ZODIAC — ** 1/2 — Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr.; rated R (violence, profanity, drugs, sex).

David Fincher is a director of estimable talents. He's technically imaginative with a great eye for detail and a feel for mood. In films like "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "Panic Room," he sets a scene, sucks you in and shows you over and over that you're in the hands of a visual master.

His abilities have often made him seem like a bit of a showoff — which is partly what makes the comparative aesthetic subtlety of "Zodiac" so striking. In telling the real-life story of a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early '70s, he makes you feel as if you're watching a film that was actually made during that time.

It's low-key, straightforward, a bit faded. No stylized tricks, nothing flashy about it.

But in toning things down, Fincher also drags them out. "Zodiac" runs an astonishing two hours and 40 minutes, and it feels like it. The director has said there was no way to make the film any shorter — that to tell this story completely, it had to be this long — and he clearly went to great lengths to get the many complicated elements just right.

But is he serious? "The Departed," which just won best picture at the Academy Awards, was two and a half hours and even that felt too long. If you're going to ask your audience to sit happily for that sort of duration, you'd better give them an absolute masterpiece of cinema.

"Zodiac" certainly has its moments but it's no masterpiece.

It's solid for the first hour and a half: taut and tense, thrilling and often darkly funny. Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt, working from the true-crime best-seller by former San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith, keep you guessing and make you feel as if you're right in the thick of the chase. (And they manage the rare feat of capturing newsroom culture accurately — especially the gallows humor.)

The film features some excellent performances from a strong cast, including Mark Ruffalo as tenacious San Francisco police inspector David Toschi (supposedly the inspiration behind Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character) and Robert Downey Jr. as self-destructive Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, who covered the Zodiac killings. Brian Cox tears it up as celebrity defense lawyer Melvin Belli, a role any character actor would have a ball playing and one that seems ideally suited for Cox's brand of off-kilter bravado.