Tag: 2.03

THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE Review: “A Random Killing” | Birth.Movies.Death.

While The Assassination of Gianni Versace is at least partially devoted to detailing the life of the famous gunned down fashion mogul – complete with his possible struggle with and recovery from HIV/AIDS – it’s mostly a serial killer profile at heart. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) is the true center of American Crime Story’s second season, as he drives halfway across the country, amassing a body count along with way. Before Versace (Edgar Ramírez) was shot dead on the front steps of his Miami estate on July 15, 1997, Cunanan killed four other men, his spree a primal expression of his own self-loathing (as this series seems to posit). Lee Miglin (Lee Farrell) was Cunanan’s third victim – a wealthy Chicago commercial architect with a “perfume queen” wife (Judith) who loved and trusted him with all her heart, his weakness for male prostitutes allowing Andrew into their bedroom, which would lead to his sad demise.

Much like the controversy that surrounds the artist’s supposed HIV diagnosis – which the Versace family adamantly disputes to this day – The Assassination of Gianni Versace may be playing fast and loose with the facts again (though investigative tomes like Wensley Clarkson’s Death at Every Stop have also included Lee’s murder in Cunanan’s sordid history). The Miglins have always maintained that the architect’s death was “a random killing”, hence the title of this episode. Though Ryan Murphy & Co. don’t make it clear how Cunanan and Miglin met, it’s an ostensibly familiar late-night phone call to Lee’s home office that prompts the deadly meeting. When Marilyn (Light) takes off on a business trip – hocking her “Pheromone” spritz for the Home Shopping Network – Lee goes to the tiny chapel in their basement and prays for forgiveness for what he’s about to do. “I try,” he almost begs with the Lord to understand. Then he goes upstairs to meet Cunanan – clearly not for the first time – but the episode leaves it up for us to decide whether Marilyn knew about her husband’s “secret life” the whole time.

It’s all campy and trashy in that inimitably Ryan Murphy sort of way – bringing longtime fans back to his work on Nip/Tuck – but any flamboyance is balanced by a mournful and sympathetic tenor. Suddenly, decades of closeted senators and CEOs are flashing through the audience’s mind, as they ponder how the Miglins’ functional yet fundamentally flawed relationship is just one of how many over the course of history – two human beings who love each other, are successful, while possibly knowing there’s something missing sexually between the two of them. “I knew it,” Marilyn says upon arriving home during the episode’s lengthy, hyper-portentous opening (which feels pulled straight out of a horror picture), and we’re not sure if she’s commenting about a premonition about Lee’s death or his attraction toward men. The whole hour is masterfully paced, fastidiously composed, and ends on a note that’s shatteringly sad.

Judith Light gets to do the bulk of the heavy emotional lifting in “A Random Killing”, and Light is in complete control of every moment. Seconds after Lee’s murder is discovered by an investigating officer, Marilyn is up and taking stock of all the items Cunanan stole from the house (including the couple’s Lexus). Throughout the rest of the episode, she struggles to remain strong, delivering a speech on HSN about how she’s always loved her “American Dream” of a husband, and only breaking down ever so slightly at the very end. Yet this minor lapse is quickly painted over by rage, as Marilyn doesn’t let anyone – including the police – try and label Lee’s death anything but a mere act of chance. “He won’t steal my good name,” she says of Andrew, echoing the sentiments of Donatella Versace (Penélope Cruz) in the wake of Gianni’s death. It’s another portrait of a female made of granite, as waves of grief attempt to erode their tight-jawed visages.

For all the sorrow, this is still American Crime Story, and Murphy lets director Gwyneth Horder-Payton and writer Tom Rob Smith indulge in some rather ghoulish sexual violence and horror set piece creation. “A Random Killing” contains a version of Andrew we haven’t seen up until now – the lying con man replaced with a venomous assassin, ready to lash out at any moment as if his murderous impulses are nothing more than diversions he indulges to tickle his loins. The actual staging of Lee’s death is difficult to watch, as Cunanan again tapes his victim’s face shut before beating and cutting him to death. Later, after discovering that Chicago PD are tracking the cell phone in the Miglins’ Lexus, he dumps the luxury car and coldly executes the driver of the red pickup we’ve seen him sporting during every episode up until this point. Darren Criss is just amazing, jettisoning any need for us to empathize with this psychopath as he transforms into a pistol-toting land shark, constantly swimming and killing in order to survive uncaptured another day.

The chronology of The Assassination of Gianni Versace continues to be a little unnecessarily convoluted – jumping from several periods between ‘92 – ’97 – but what the show might be overdoing in terms of storytelling style, it’s more than making up for in terms of raw poignancy. The final shot of Marilyn Miglin’s face, captured in a slow creeping zoom, is as haunting as OJ staring up at that statue at the very end of The People v. OJ Simpson. Perhaps the most miraculous element of American Crime Story (and there are so, so many) is its ability to isolate pure truthful emotion inside of headline-grabbing sensationalism, mining the country’s tabloid myths for what they actually mean to the figures who lived through these horrid exploits.

THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE Review: “A Random Killing” | Birth.Movies.Death.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Episode 3 Has Less Versace, Goes Deep into the Killer’s Psyche

If it wasn’t clear from its first two episodes, the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story made it official: despite putting the fashion designer’s name in its title, this Ryan Murphy-produced series is actually more interested in Versace’s assassin: Andrew Cunanan. Played by Darren Criss, this seductive serial killer is a fascinating character. He’s both charming and terrifying in equal respects. But he remains a cipher. You’re still left wondering, what’s guiding his killing spree? (By the time he got to Miami, he’d already killed 4 other men).

Episode three offered a few answers, though motivations remain murky as we flash back to May 1997 — months before Versace was gunned down in Miami Beach — where Marilyn Miglin (Who’s the Boss?’s Judith Light) finds her husband, Chicago tycoon Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), dead in their home. Yes, that means this entire hour is entirely devoid of our fave trio of star performers. No balding Edgar Ramirez as Gianni. No pitch-black-haired Ricky Martin as his partner Antonio. And, sadly, no bleach-blond Penelope Cruz as Donatella.

Instead, we open with Marilyn hawking her perfume on the Home Shopping Network, unaware that her husband was at that very moment entertaining Cunanan in their home. The meeting, as tabloids and newspapers alike reported at the time, ended in a gruesome murder that stained the reputation of the esteemed Miglin. This is no clean or simple murder: Cunanan is savage in his treatment of Lee, using duct tape, a screwdriver, cables, and even a bag of cement to torture and eventually kill him. As he tells him in a fit of fury, he wants everyone to see him disgraced, wants everyone to know that Lee was a sissy, that he had built Chicago with a limp wrist.

Just as with the last two episodes, though, the central concern of Murphy’s show seems to be the extent to which constructs like the closet and wider systemic homophobia helped and fueled Cunanan’s killings. While we may not (yet) know exactly why this predatory escort targets wealthier and most often closeted gay men (like the hapless guy in the hotel room in episode 2), his rage at Lee’s success and picture-perfect heteronormative family suggests there’s a level of self-hatred at work here, laced with envy no doubt.

But if the murder was tinged with a dizzying sense of denial wrapped in seduction — Cunanan loves nothing more than to be adored, to be looked at and admired — the investigation into Miglin’s death and Marilyn’s reaction to it show the other side of it. Playing the dutiful wife in a mask of garish makeup, Light breathes life to a woman who may have known about her husband’s indiscretions but is too invested in the reputation they’d build together to admit that the death was anything other than the result of a burglary gone wrong. Yes, even with the knowledge that the body was found next to gay pornographic magazines. This culture of silence handicaps the investigation but also exemplifies how much of late 90s gay identity politics were still a game of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a weakness that Cunanan knew all too well how to exploit.

This Week’s MVP:

If this has to be the Cunanan show, at least Murphy and company landed on a performer as talented as Darren Criss. The former Glee star imbues the devilish serial killer with just the right amount of crazy. Whether ingratiating himself to Versace in the pilot while talking of his family’s Italian lineage or suddenly berating Lee for wanting to impress him with plans for the (sadly never built) Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle which would’ve been the highest building in the world, Criss hints at the darkness within Cunanan. More importantly, as the makers of the show have been quick to point out, the actor is half-Filipino, just as the character he portrays — a bit of kismet casting that keeps that bit of Cunanan’s heritage front and center.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Episode 3 Has Less Versace, Goes Deep into the Killer’s Psyche

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S02E03: A Random Killing – A detour from the main crime proves to be the strongest episode yet

American Crime Story always has to walk the fine line between entertainment and exploitation. Many would argue, and not inclined to disagree, that the very existence of these two seasons of television are nothing more than exploitative stories that undermine the severity of the event that they are based on. This is the problem, and indeed part of the attraction to true crime stories, that our efforts to understand the world around us is often through stories. We make sense of things through our relationship with narrative, character, and motivations.

In essence, this is what law enforcement does when a murder has been committed. As investigators have to, by necessity, turn up and make sense of the end of a story, in this case a murder, they have to connect many dispirit elements like motive, opportunity, and possible relations to the victim that could make sense in this context. This episode’s title, A Random Killing, is ironic for many reasons. For one, there may be no such thing as a random killing, while the circumstances around a murder may appear random, it’s through these investigations that actions and scenarios start to make sense. After all, making sense of a situation robs it of this definition. Of course, from the perspective of the choice of victims, there is a strong element of random circumstance. Andrew’s choice to kill his fourth victim for his truck is certainly a chance encounter. Yet, when you pull together all the threads into a narrative, much like law enforcement officers, and true crime authors like Maureen Orth, the chain of events feels less random.

Following this through, lets take a look at the murder of Andrew’s fourth victim, 45-year-old caretaker William Reese. It’s a small part of the episode but it’s hugely important given the non-linear structure of the series so far. The murder itself, the reasons for it happening at all, and the consequences of it are all part of the detailed tapestry that head writer Tom Robbin Smith is constructing in order for us to understand Andrew’s actions.

After Andrew steals Lee Miglin’s car, we are told that the authorities can track him through the car phone. This is a lucky break, and we are assured that there is no way that Andrew would know about this. Then the media gets involved. Though it’s never stated within the episode where the leak comes from, probably someone looking to make a quick buck from the tabloids, the information about the car phone is reported through the media. Andrew hears this on the car radio and immediately pulls over and rips out both the phones receiver and the antenna on top of the car. This doesn’t solve his problem as the car looks even more conspicuous. Andrew’s next move is to ditch the car and steal another leading to him following William Reese home to murder him and steal his red pick-up truck: the same pick-up truck that gained notoriety from the Versace case.

Taken as a story, with the idea of cause and effect, this murder is much less random. Still, and this is a crucial part of this season’s challenge: why did Andrew pick Reese’s truck? The scene is played as an internal decision, Darren Criss gives us a small expression that says, “that’s the one”, but we don’t know exactly why. From ta narrative perspective, we know this because the truck is now famous, and pivotal to the Versace case, but there is still that ambiguity.

The other ironic part of this episode, which the title directly relates to, is that Lee Miglin’s murder is framed through two warring narratives: his killer, Andre Cunanan, and his wife Marilyn. With the first two episodes of the season focusing on the chaos of the Versace case, A Random Killing is brilliantly clear-sighted. This is the story of three people: real estate tycoon Lee Miglin, his killer, and his wife.

A Random Killing could be a brilliant standalone story, but it’s elevated by how it informs the broader narrative of this seasons case. If this season has a strength that The People v OJ lacked, it’s the attention paid to the victims. This season has humanised three out of Andrew Cunanan’s victims so far, with Lee Miglin being the most effective. This is achieved through a combination of clever writing, excellent performances, and stellar direction. He is almost a practice victim for Andrew before Versace. Both Miglin and Versace where towering figures in their respective industries, both had powerful women by their side, and both were immortalised in the worst way by Andrew Cunanan.

Darren Criss is fantastic once again as Cunanan. Through his wild performance he is able to create this very human monster and his possession of a homicidal inferiority complex. Andrew wants to be the best, it doesn’t matter at what, and his failure in this area has been internalised until he can take it out on powerful men, by using his sexuality as a weapon. As good as Criss is, Judith Light runs away with the episode as Marilyn Miglin. Her poise, and steely reserve keep her strong despite the loss of her soul mate. It’s never made clear whether Lee hid is sexuality from his wife, but there are subtle hints that both had an arrangement around this secret.

Finally, a note on the direction. Gwyneth Horder-Payton, who has also directed The Americans and Feud, shots the episode like a horror movie of high society. Like a detective, she lays out the scenario of Lee’s murder, the meat with the knife in it, the melted ice cream, and dares us to fill in the blanks. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the episode, apart from Lee’s chilling death, is the very fact of Andrew’s presence after he is long gone. As the police search the house, rooms are bathed in the warm pink tones that we associate with Andrew, like he has psychically stained the house, as well as the lives he has destroyed.

9/10 – The best episode so far.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S02E03: A Random Killing – A detour from the main crime proves to be the strongest episode yet

‘American Crime Story’ Shifts Gears to Andrew Cunanan’s Murder Spree

It’s in episode three that American Crime Story season 2 really starts to become “The Andrew Cunanan Story” rather than “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” It makes sense that Versace’s murder is where the show started, but the season is actually about Cunanan’s murder spree, and Versace is only the tail end of that. There’s a lot more story to tell about Cunanan’s other crimes and his life prior to becoming a murderer, and this is honestly where the season starts to get really good, in my opinion.

Because of the non-linear storytelling, we back up a bit in time to May 1997. This is where Judith Light (who is amazing and should be in all the shows) makes her first appearance as Marilyn Miglin. She’s the wife of Lee Miglin, a Chicago real estate magnate and Cunanan’s third victim. Since the show works backward, showing us the crimes first and the set-up second, this episode begins with Marilyn arriving home after a business trip and sensing something is wrong in her townhouse.

She asks some neighbors who are passing by to help her look around, and they find Lee’s mangled body in the garage (though we don’t know at this point that he had been tortured before his death). The tension and dread were so palpable as Marilyn and her friends walked through the house.

Backing up to a week earlier, we learn that the Miglins clearly have great affection for one another. However, it feels as though Marilyn is in love with Lee and Lee simply cares very much for Marilyn. Those are not the same thing.

But it’s working for them — except for the fact that Lee sees male escorts on the side. That’s who Cunanan poses as, and the show indicates the two have seen each other several times previously, though we aren’t given any details in that regard. But in this particular instance, Cunanan isn’t actually there as an escort — he’s mid-murder spree. He acts like he’s going to sleep with Miglin, but instead he brutally beats and kills him.

When we flash back to after the murder, Marilyn (who must have at least had an inkling about her husband’s real sexual identity) is refusing to believe what the police are telling her, instead citing all the stolen items — clothes, gold coins, money — as proof that this was obviously an intruder whom Lee surprised mid-robbery. She’s holding herself together as well as can be expected, but in private, she breaks down about the death of her husband and how wonderful their marriage was. It’s a heartbreaking monologue, and Judith Light performs the hell out of it. Look for her to earn at least an Emmy nom (if not a win) for guest star later this year.

Meanwhile, Andrew is moving on down the road in Lee’s car, which has a car phone in it. Every time the phone turns on, the police are able to track Andrew’s location. But that bit of information makes it into a news broadcast, and Andrew realizes he has to ditch the car. So he kills his fourth victim, William Reese (Gregg Lawrence), and steals his red pickup truck, heading for Florida to confront Versace.

It’s a bit weird that after two episodes that focused so heavily on Versace, we now have an episode that doesn’t mention him at all. The only Versace blip in episode three is that Cunanan visits the Versace store in New York. I understand the writers wanting to focus on the Miglins — the EPs told me that it’s important to the show to do justice to the other victims who were not famous fashion designers — but it’s still a little jarring.

What do you think of American Crime Story season 2 so far? Tell us @BritandCo.

‘American Crime Story’ Shifts Gears to Andrew Cunanan’s Murder Spree

Give Judith Light an Emmy for Her Guest Spot on ‘American Crime Story’

“They killed my husband for a car.”

That is what Home Shopping Network star Marilyn Miglin, played by Judith Light, tells her viewing audience at the end of the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. It’s what the rest of the world was told as well: Her husband, Chicago real estate magnate Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), was the unfortunate victim of a random act of violence. Tragic, but most important, random.

The real story behind Miglin’s murder is much more complicated and multifaceted—there’s compelling evidence that Miglin knew his murderer, spree killer Andrew Cunanan (as portrayed in Versace by a terrifying Darren Criss). Not only that, Miglin was quite likely a client of Cunanan, who was a high-end escort for gay men. Following her husband’s murder, the most important thing to Marilyn is perception, and the lengths necessary to preserve a certain outward facade that’s falling apart.

As a dramatized account of Cunanan’s killing spree, Versace has the liberty to put the implied pieces together as follows. Miglin’s corpse was gruesomely left for show, spread out alongside gay porn magazines; Cunanan put women’s underwear on Miglin postmortem. The Miglins were a powerful couple well connected with the cops, and therefore, Marilyn is able to keep the details of her husband’s death—and the heavy implication that he was a closeted gay man—private.

The weight of this juxtaposition that the Versace viewer is privy to—public versus private—and the excruciating burden of keeping those two things separate, falls almost entirely on Judith Light’s performance. Her face is how Versace communicates its central theme, the way a systemic, internalized homophobia and suppression of truth allowed a killer like Cunanan to break free, and the devastating way that affected the lives of people such as Marilyn. It’s not every day that a show gives a guest actor this level of responsibility, but Versace does, and Light is up to the task. “A Random Killing” aired on the last day of January; we’re barely into the second month of 2018. But with her portrayal of Marilyn Miglin, Judith Light has already wrapped up the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

Since this episode, like most of the Versace season, is chronologically all over the place, we see Marilyn at different points, before and after the death of her husband. Even while Lee is alive, Marilyn’s expression is consistently poignant. The Miglins have built a successful life, but there’s a distance between them, an unspoken secret; something that feels like it’s been festering for decades.

Versace implies—again, because it can—that Marilyn probably knew, at the very least, that her husband was gay; it also implies that Miglin knew that she knew. Perhaps the most telling moment in the episode comes as the Miglins prepare for bed. Lee places his hand directly over his wife’s, somewhat platonically, and Marilyn then locks their fingers together—a more intimate embrace.

Light nails her character’s physical tics, which present Marilyn as a mess of contradictions—she seems less concerned that her husband was keeping secrets from her than with keeping the public facade of their marriage intact. When she finds out that her husband is dead—after arriving home and finding the house in a somewhat suspicious state—she whispers to herself, “I knew it.” She’s disconcertingly calm around the cops, until she breaks into tears, her makeup smearing in the process—doubling as some unsubtle but effective subtext. “How dare they say our marriage was a sham?” she chides, as Light cathartically falls apart, releasing some of her character’s suppressed emotions. “Lee and I shared our whole lives. We shared all kinds of adventures. We rode in hot air balloons. When I was lost in the desert, he rescued me. How many couples can say they have that kind of romance? I loved him. I loved him very much.”

The episode closes with Marilyn addressing Lee’s death on air. “When I first started selling my perfume on television,” she says, “my friend Dorsey Connors, who hosted her own television show, gave me a piece of advice. And she said, ‘Just think of the little red light as the man you love.’” Light’s face staring at the camera is the final image we see before the credits, unspooling the same wounded emotions she shared with the cops in private, now public.

I apologize to all other actresses set to make splashy guest appearances on television in the coming months. The Emmy belongs to Judith Light.

Give Judith Light an Emmy for Her Guest Spot on ‘American Crime Story’

AMERICAN CRIME STORY Review: “A Random Killing”

There are a lot more crimes in FX’s American Crime Story than there were last season. The series previously explored the killing of his Nicole Brown Simpson, and largely centered on the moving pieces surrounding the murder investigation and the trial. The season largely played with the fact that to this day, people are not 100% certain if O.J. Simpson was in fact guilty of that murder (I mean, c’mon, he did it). This season in contrast shows us exactly who did it right off the bat in the first few minutes of the premiere. We know who did it, where, when, and how… But we don’t know why.

And that’s what Ryan Murphy and the show’s other creators seem to be hanging this season, about the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, on entirely. We never got flashbacks in season one (except for one Kardashian one, an odd choice) but here we are with each new episode thus far jumping around in time, showing us exactly what Andrew Cunanan did leading up to his infamous shooting outside the Versace home in Miami Beach.

The episode is quite effectively it’s own contained story, without any of the Versace’s making an appearance, or any of the Miami investigators. It begins with a character we haven’t met you, Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) pushing her perfume on a QVC-type network. After the appearance, she flies back to her home in Chicago and we immediately know something is up when her husband Lee is not there to pick her up. She phones the house from a payphone saying she’s grabbing a gab. When she gets home she noticed that there is an ice cream container open on the counter. She tells some neighbors she knows that something is wrong. Soon the police are there and find Lee’s (Mike Farrell) body in the garage. And all Marilyn can utter is “I knew it.”

We’re flashing back next to not long before Marilyn left to do her TV stint. Marilyn and Lee are at a Jim Edgar for Illinois Governor fundraiser, and Marilyn gives quite an introduction to her husband, calling him not just an example of, but THE American Dream. It’s really quite nice, but at home when it’s the two of them, we get the feeling there is a wedge between them. There is no animosity, but there is no warmth between husband and wife either. When Andrew calls to tell Lee he’s in town, we know where this is heading.

When Marilyn leaves for another TV appearance, Lee is left to his own devices. He has a sort of prayer room in his basement, where he lights candles, gets on his knees, and prays to Jesus. “I try,” he says, tearfully. Maybe he does, but soon there’s a knock on the door and he’s fixing his collar in a mirror. “Andrew,” he greets the young man, and brings him in for a warm embrace. Lee feeds him and asks if he can stay the night, closing the curtains. Whatever qualms he had before Andrew arrived seem to have gone out the window. Lee flaunts his blueprints for the Sky Needle, soon to be the tallest building in Chicago. As he’s doting over them, Andrew raises a gun behind his back. He puts it down before Lee turns around again, though.

Soon they’re arguing over what Lee should call this building of his; Andrew wants Lee to name it after himself, but Lee insists it’s not about him. Andrew gets cross and asks, why did you ask me here to talk about this? “We don’t have to talk,” Lee replies. Not long after that, Andrew has him in the garage (where we know his body ends up), binding and gagging his face like we’ve seen him do to other older wealthy gentlemen in past episode, only this time leaving Lee’s nostrils free to breathe. But before we know it Andrew has Lee on the ground, comes close to chocking him, then smashes Lee’s nose and admits that he has already killed two people. And that when they find his body, he will be wearing ladies panties and surrounded by gay porn. He wants the world to see that the “great Lee Miglin is a sissy.”

So perhaps THIS is a key to the “why” behind Cunanan’s atrocities. He wanted to shine a light on high-profile closeted homosexuals? But then how does that square with what he did to Versace, who was openly homosexual?

“You know, disgrace isn’t that bad… once you settle into it,” Andrew tells Lee just before killing him with a bag of concrete mix, in one of the most chilling moments of either seasons.

From here the investigation gets underway. Superintendent Rodriguez takes the case, assuring Marilyn they will catch whoever did this. The Chicago PD and the Feds are able to ping the car phone of Lee Miglin’s Lexus and track Cunanan’s path. But, despite Rodriguez demanding this stay hush hush, Andrew hears a news broadcast on the radio as he’s driving about the authorities being able to track him through the car phone. He immediately pulls off the road and yanks the car phone out of the vehicle. In a panic to switch vehicles, he ends up following a man with a truck and murdering him senselessly to steal it. How did that fit into Andrew’s plan to out closeted gay men? At the end of the episode, as we know because he needs to be free to murder Gianni, Andrew is still at large and we have no real questions answered. Perhaps we’re not going to get a clear “why” by the end of the season, just like we still don’t know 100% if O.J. killed his wife. Perhaps the question in and of itself is the point.

AMERICAN CRIME STORY Review: “A Random Killing”