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Though a notorious hardass who is rumored to be extremely difficult to work with, David Fincher brings out the very best in his actors. From Brad Pitt to Jodie Foster to Ben Affleck, Fincher's direction strips any previous notions the audience may have about the star on the screen, and, if anything, works against assumptions we have about said talent thanks to the inundation of info flooding our celebrity worship culture. Yes, Fincher is a master of his craft and, to an extent, helps actors become better masters of theirs — perhaps most strikingly with Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac.
Though Gyllenhaal has been a fully formed actor since he battled his inner demons and a terrifying bunny in Donnie Darko, the emo eye-candy became a laughing stock in Bubble Boy and Highway before taking a turn for the sensitive hottie next door in Lovely & Amazing, The Good Girl, Moonlight Mile, Proof, and The Day After Tomorrow. Gyllenhaal's stardom propelled tenfold after starring alongside Heath Ledger in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, which, depending on the maturity of the crowd around you, becomes either a giggly gay cowboy joke or a comment on how much they miss Heath Ledger. Nonetheless, Gyllenhaal's Oscar-nominated performance garnered him some serious attention, as did his role in Sam Mendes' Jarhead shortly after. The actor was being choosier about the directors he worked with, and it paid off, earning him the lead role in Fincher's appallingly underrated Zodiac.
Disappearing from Netflix at the end of this month, Zodiac is among the director's (and the actor's, for that matter) least talked about films. But unlike, say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is seen as the filmmaker's Hollywood-appeasing flick, Zodiac is Fincher in the raw, which created the Jake Gyllenhaal we know now. Set in the early '70s, the film chronicles the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for nearly a decade, claimed almost a dozen victims, and drove investigators and reporters to the brink of sanity by changing his patterns, leaving dead-end clues, and disappearing for years at a time. In the film, Gyllenhaal portrays Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist turned informal investigator for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was first exposed to the Zodiac's harrowing letters. A tale of obsession on all fronts, Zodiac grips you from the get-go, and by the time the credits roll you won't believe three hours have passed.
The film, similar to the Zodiac himself, begs to be analyzed. It's a master crime drama whose genius nuances are probably only talked to death in film classes and by obsessive Fincher fans, but they deserve to be dissected by any film lover. Zodiac would have been nothing more than a creepy biopic if it weren't for Gyllenhaal, whose performance may have saved him from run-of-the-mill pretty boy roles and instead pushed him into the dramatic and action realms where he continues to stun — especially in Dan Gilroy's recent Nightcrawler.
Though wrongfully bumped from the Oscar race, Gyllenhaal shocked and awed as the deranged Louis Bloom, a cripplingly lonely con man who slithers his way into the cutthroat world of L.A. night crawling — freelancing for late-night news scoops. Without Gyllenhaal, Gilroy's debut may have slipped through the indie cracks into oblivion given its uneven satirical themes and tacked-on ending. Gyllenhaal, however, turned it into awards bait with subtly disturbing scenes of a mad man controlling a media landscape through bouts of overexposure and withheld information. Louis' pure lack of empathy is slightly reminiscent of the actor's portrayal of Graysmith, who chose investigating the Zodiac killer over his marriage and three kids. One thing is for certain: Gyllenhaal is far more authentic as a man on a mission then as a dude rolling around in bed with Anne Hathaway or trying to reverse time (i.e. the lame Source Code and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time).
Playing up the pretty-boy appeal wasn't necessarily a dumb move as he segued into darker roles with Rendition, opposite Reese Witherspoon and his brother-in-law Peter Sarsgaard, or in the post-war drama Brothers, opposite Tobey Maguire. In both David Ayer's End of Watch and Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, Gyllenhaal gave commanding performances as police officers dealing with the toughest of subject matter: racial violence and kidnappings, respectively. After that, we were graced with Enemy (also directed by Villeneueve), an undeniable primer for Louis Bloom and Nightcrawler, in which Gyllenhaal plays solemn history professor, Adam, who discovers his exact lookalike in a movie and feels compelled to track him down. The actor, playing both Adam and his evil twin, Anthony, was in almost every single scene, much like he was in Nightcrawler.
Since Zodiac and his most recent endeavors, Gyllenhaal has proved that he has no trouble carrying entire films, which we'll see him do three times in a row this year with boxing drama Southpaw, expedition drama Everest, and finally Demolition, directed by the exquisite Jean-Marc Vallée, who as we know, helps get his actors nominated and win Oscars. Yet, without Fincher and his role as Robert Graysmith, this kind of work may have come later for Gyllenhaal, whose blessed good looks could have very well pigeon-holed him into rom-com fodder and Prince of Persia 2.
It might be fun to see Gyllenhaal take his darkness and cultivated intensity over to the tube at some point in the near future. True Detective Season Three, anyone?
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Photos: Everett Collection
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