Zero Effect (1998)

Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman) is your typical eccentric master detective. When he’s not working on a case, he locks himself in his costly home to cower and whimper and write horrifying songs, only communicating with and through his pitiable assistant Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller, but don’t worry, he’s wasn’t that deeply unfunny “Ben Stiller” persona yet when this was made but rather a serviceable actor). Zero’s not exactly a people person, though once he works a case, he’s pretty good at emulating one, approaching the rest of humanity as something he has studied carefully, yet isn’t a true part of.

Zero is hired by a sleazy business tycoon named Gregory Stark (Ryan O’Neal) to get back some mysterious keys and solve a case of blackmail for him. Stark’s not exactly forthcoming with details, but then, as Arlo explains early on, in the end, Zero will find out everything anyway, including the mandatory dark secrets of the past. Why, he might even find out something about himself thanks to the case and ambulance driver Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens) who may or may not be involved in the whole affair.

By now, there’s hardly any cop or detective show running on TV that doesn’t feature some kind of eccentric/mentally ill/supernatural/perfectly idiotic detective, so the basic idea of Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect doesn’t sound terribly fresh anymore from our benighted age. However, the eccentric Great Detective wasn’t actually invented by 00s television desperate to rip off Columbo (nor by Columbo itself). Even leaving that Great Detective aside, there are many more literary detectives – particularly outside the hardboiled genres – who are dysfunctional in various degrees. A serial character needs a gimmick after all. Going by the intelligent and often very inventive way he uses the genre and what comes with it, I’m reasonably sure Kasdan knows about this tradition rather well, so this is not a case of Hollywood using an old trope thinking it to be new.

Zero is a rather extreme case of dysfunctionality, isolated, pathologically afraid of everything and positioning himself as a complete outside observer of the world of humanity as he is. At first, it’s easy to believe the film will mostly play out as a comedy that’s going to use its protagonist’s eccentricity as an easy way to earn its laughs; the film does after all indeed get quite a few very funny scenes out of Zero’s curious habits and the inspired way Pullman portrays him. However, the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes how much more ambitious it is, and the simple comedy turns out to also be a rather well constructed mystery, a romance, a meditation about the nature of the figure of the Great Detective and his relations to the figure we know as The Woman, a poignant and somewhat hopeful film about loneliness and isolation and the way isolation caused by outside forces and the kind that come from inside can go hand in hand, and even a film concerned with questions of morality and justice. While this sounds like rather a lot for a single film to take on, Kasdan manages to do all of these questions and themes justice, seemingly with ease always finding the right thematic point to emphasise – as well as the right question to ask – and using every scene’s potential to its fullest. In the intelligence of the film and how easy Kasdan makes it look to apply his own, this is as good as direction gets; I have honestly no idea how this director ended up doing stuff like Bad Teacher for a living later on.

The film isn’t just clever and thoughtful, it is also emotionally satisfying, handling a romance that might feel like a complete cliché in a very convincing and natural manner. There’s also something pleasantly and effectively hopeful in the film’s emotional core, the idea that isolation can and will end, and that, while there’s not necessarily a glorious happy end waiting for the lonely, there’s hope and life even for those who only ever observe. And the best thing about it? It never feels too easy, dishonest, or disrespectful of its characters while doing it.


I’m not going to end this happy rambling about a wonderful film without giving Pullman a special nod. He does, after all, have the difficult job to not just portray a dysfunctional genius and the embodiment of an archetype and turn him into a human being, but also stands at the core of nearly all of the film’s shifts in tone and theme. He does this while making it look as easy as Kasdan does filmmaking.