“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” wasted no time taking us right into the epicenter of this season–the untimely, gruesome demise of Gianni Versace. The episode began with a calm, inviting instrumental as we watched Versace prepare for the day in his extremely lavish mansion in Miami.
Simultaneously, we got a glimpse of a man alone near the ocean, deep in his thoughts over what he was about to do. This man, we very quickly learn, is Andrew Cunanan, and the reason for his discomfort lies solely in the fact he is about to commit murder.
One of the things that instantly stood out in this premiere episode was the culmination of the background music mixed in with the dramatic camera angles. It brought us extremely close yet so far from the subjects it was focused on. Whether it was bird’s eye view or focused dead-on, something about the angles helped viewers connect with the brutality of the story being told.
The show took an interesting approach as the story unfolded in a bit of a reverse manner, starting off with the murder. However, a flashback takes us back to October 1990 in San Francisco at a private members-only club. It is here where Andrew and Versace meet for the very first time, and the interaction proves to be interesting, to say the least.
This interaction not only scores Andrew some time with Versace but upon some relentless effort, also snags him an invite to the opera. The scenes that follow highlight some of Darren Criss’ best work encapsulating Andrew Cunanan’s pathological liar tendencies.
While he tells his friends of the meeting with Versace, he flips the story, telling them Versace sought him out and even made condescending references to the fact Versace was gay. Throughout the rest of the episode, we see Cunanan’s character concoct a series of embellished lies that left us wondering, he can’t possibly be lying, right?
A quick jolt back to the present brings us to the moment Cunanan takes Versace’s life. From here on begins Cunanan’s run from the authorities. Glimpses of Cunanan maniacally laughing and smiling brought all the chills and fright, as we watched him celebrate his success. Kudos to Darren Criss for literally killing it in this episode.
What was perhaps the most interesting aspect of this episode was the investigation into it. Instead of shifting the focus to the crime at hand, the police questioned Versace’s boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) about their ‘extracurricular’ activities.
It’s safe to assume this was Ryan Murphy’s attempt to highlight some of the social prejudices of the time. Watching the cop repeatedly ask D’Amico about how he and Versace were partners was next-level cringe. Knowing they were gay, he continued to prod and refused to hear the truth.
The story could not progress without the introduction of Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz). Flying into town upon hearing of her brother’s death, her presence surely shook up the story a bit. Cruz was the perfect choice to play Donatella, whom she truly encapsulated in style, voice, and personality. Her entrance into the story resulted in Versace, as a company, pulling out of the pre-planned IPO. It also began to push D’Amico out of the picture and right into the background.
As the episode came to a close, information about Cunanan’s whereabouts surface at a local pawn shop. However, upon breaking into the apartment, the police find a junkie in his place. In the final moments, we see Cunanan glancing at magazines heading Versace’s murder. With a creepy, sinister smile, he buys every single one of them.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace dove head first into one of the most brutal celebrity murders of the 90’s. His murder made its mark on the world–most notably, the fashion world. Ryan Murphy’s take on this was beautiful, haunting, and poetic. It also nostalgically thrust us into the 90’s, at a time where dystopian futures rule our television screens.
If the premiere is any indication, we are in for one hell of a ride as we dive deeper into this complicated story–and Cunanan’s mind. Let’s just say come next award season, we won’t be surprised if the series and cast are nominated in every category–with Darren Criss whisking away an award.
The trick with this season of American Crime Story is that we know the who, and the how, and the when, but we will never be able to do anything but speculate on the why. Cunanan left very few breadcrumbs. So the show turned to Maureen Orth’s book on the subject, which she by all accounts reported as well and throughly as anyone could, to fill in some of the empty spaces on the canvas. That meant making some leaps, which in the premiere led to the scene in which Versace and Cunanan chill in a club and at the opera in San Francisco, which never felt real even as we watched, in a funky way where you almost questioned whether it was a dream sequence. (Orth believes they had met at least once before, but — and this is partly because Cunanan was a skilled pathological liar — it’s impossible to know if it happened, much less if the version he did tell friends is true, or the one the show imagines of him pushing his way in with a cool falsehood about Italy, etc.) And here, it’s the HIV subplot.
The Versace family has always denied that Gianni Versace had HIV; to this day, per Vanity Fair, Donatella says he had ear cancer that forced him out of the public eye, only to have it declared cured six months before his death. That same story lays out that he became ill in 1994 and ceded some control of the company to Donatella, then rebounded and reclaimed his position six months before he died. That gels with the timeline of HIV/AIDS patients beginning to see results from a new drug cocktail. Both the producers and Orth had various sources off-the-record saying he had HIV, and that it was the reason the family rushed to have him cremated, but the dots can’t really connect beyond that.
Ergo, the show goes all-in on it, but the quotes about why in the VF article are much more impactful-sounding than the way it actually plays out in the episode. I thought the show seemed very disconnected from the idea the writers discuss about how Versace was a creator of life and of art, who’d confronted his mortality and then thought he’d risen again. To me, the sense of his sickness and health were very passively presented, and mostly just provided building blocks for tension between Donatella and Versace’s lover Antonio. The more poignant scene came from the parallel tale of Max Greenfield’s Ronnie, a wan junkie who meets Andrew Cunanan and he details the weird loneliness of being an unexpected survivor of the drug cocktail — and of believing you were going to die, then finding out you have a second chance and having nothing to use it for — while Cunanan alters his backstory once again to try and paint himself into that picture.
Darren Criss makes a good Cunanan, slipping coolly from one lie to the next, at times not wholly believable but in ways that suggest that’s deliberate (as he did, in fact, not entirely get away with it). In defending his admiration of Versace to Ronnie, he says, “When they told him what he wanted wasn’t possible, he just made it himself…. The great creator. The man I could’ve been.” By the end, he’s stalking Versace to a club, then repelling a man’s advances with a gaggle of intentionally obvious fake backstories that includes one truth (“I’m a serial killer”) before announcing, “I’m the one least likely to be forgotten,” and then, as we cut to black, whispering, “I’m ANDREW CUNANAN.” Given that there was an FBI manhunt going on for him already by this time, it seems silly at first that they’d write him so cavalierly trumpeting his real name, but it drives home Cunanan’s total insanity — both the sense that he might’ve believed himself bulletproof, and that maybe didn’t want to be, hungry as he was for a notoriety that he felt the world denied him any other way.
Oh, and also, this show LOVES close calls. There’s one with the dude Cunanan robs who balks at calling the cops, one at a sub shop where an employee recognizes him from a poster, and kind of one with the cop played by Dascha Polanco. The FBI, already searching for Cunanan for his other crimes (which I didn’t even know!), wants to focus on Fort Lauderdale and its supposedly wealthier group of marks; she eye-rolls that and then runs off a bunch of WANTED flyers on the sly because she thinks he’ll be in Miami Beach. I have no idea, obviously, how much ANY of that is accurate, but: Score one for the lady, even if they didn’t get him in time.
This is actually Versace and Antonio sneaking into the hospital to discuss HIV treatments, but it LOOKS like a still from his music video, “(I Want Your) Measurements.”
It’s a continual delight to see that Versace embraced such subtlety in his interior design. I bet that wasn’t even his bed; just a fainting place.
I really need to work in having a more attractive sick bed. (Having said that, he comes home and flops down and everyone sniffles about his illness, and then he’s TOTALLY FINE later and we don’t really hear about his miraculous recovery, so… I guess this was a good nap.)
Ricky Martin spends a lot of time looking perplexed in front of elaborate tile work.
And Penelope Cruz makes a good, but also distracting, Donatella. What I mean is: She nails the voice, from what I can tell, but it also sounds like she is acting around some kind of false teeth that is giving her a slight lisp. Which she MIGHT be. Or she’s just really hitting that hard on her own.
This is one of the few times we see Donatella NOT in black, and I wish it was a better shot of it. Gianni, here, is also a Fug National in training.
Everyone Grieves Hotter in Sunglasses.
Th Donatellas in this are not that far apart in the timeline – just days, months, etc – so I guess maybe we’re meant to think here she just hadn’t penciled in her eyebrows, rather than that she was entering into her bleached phase? I don’t know. I honestly think it’s mostly a visual cue that you’re looking at post-killing vs pre-killing Doantella. Then again, it’s hard to mix that up, given that she’s in all her other scenes WITH Versace.
In death as in life, Versace loved a pattern.
This is the point on Passions when someone rescued Theresa’s coffin. They waited a good long time. Also, she was still alive, so it was a bit more important. But I look at this and think how EXPENSIVE all that makeup and the coffin was, for them to just immediately send him into the flames. I guess one’s final wishes are one’s final wishes.
And here is his final resting place. This scene of the ashes being wrapped upa and packed for customs and then tucked into an ornate box reminded me vaguely of Rowan Atkinson wrapping the gift in Love, Actually. It needed more pot pourri.
Darren Criss managed to be a pretty good facial likeness for Cunanan, and this shot also underscores that he ALSO may have slipped past people’s notice for so long because he looked like SUCH an everydude – here, a secondary character with no actual plot in an early 90s teen movie.
I cannot think of anything I want to drink LESS on a road trip.
The sets are so good. I don’t know how much was created on soundstages and how much was from actual locations, but everything here feels SO Miami Beach – the font on the address over the door, the pink walls, the floor. I lived in Miami from 1990-92, so I missed this, plus I was pretty far removed from South Beach. So I can’t offer any real insight. This does just feel really correct, though.
And the flamingo pen on the desk! My dad’s office balcony had standing water on it that no one would fix, so he got an inflatable flamingo and put it out there to register his discontent. He named it Placido Flamingo. One day, he came to work and someone had murdered it with a screwdriver. IT WENT UNSOLVED. That could be season three?
Max Greenfield did a very good job shedding the Schmidt. His Ronnie character felt fairly well-realized and sad, like a person whose past meant he’d forgotten how to see a future for himself – versus Cunanan, who simply reinvented his pasts in the hope that one of them would give him what he sought.
Naturally, in the midst of their serious conversation about HIV and life and Versace, Darren Criss rinses off in a Speedo.
He also picks up a cruiser on South Beach so that he and Ronnie can get cash for crack (and I guess other things). “I can be submissive,” the man offers. “You have NO IDEA,” Andrew replies, and then wraps his ENTIRE FACE with duct tape.
As the dude begins to panic and tear fruitlessly at his face tape, Andrew dances to “Easy Lover,” which is REALLY on-the-nose but also rather amusing (his Hedwig background comes in handy here a bit). And, it’s more Speedo time. Cunanan does of course eventually give him a breathing hole, having asserted his control long enough and also scoured the hotel room for stuff he can swipe.
And then he eats a room service steak. (The poor old dude seems super traumatized, and chickens out on calling the cops, which is a bit of a lame “SEE LOOK HE COULD’VE BEEN CAUGHT SOONER” thing that is unnecessary given the later one at the Miami Subs shop where the kid calls the cops but Cunanan leaves.)
I didn’t know about this final couture show, which was apparently a battle between Donatella’s girls – the waifs – and Versace’s, which per the show were women he thinks looked fuller and like they loved life. (That being, Naomi Campbell, so… obviously only fuller by certain standards.)
And it was in this outfit, roughly. They were not able to get a super great facial approximation for Naomi Campbell, although… IS there even one? And so they shot her from a great distance.
Victory for Versace…
… and sadness for Donatella, who at least flashes him a half-hearted thumbs-up after none of her clothes or models got the same warm reaction as his. Of course, this show conveys that by having the crowd applaud during the entire show, which is WHOLLY unaccurate and annoying to me. Also annoying: We never get to see this outfit.
Speaking of things in silver, while Ronnie os monologuing about opening a vending cart on South Beach with his new pal Andy, Cunanan is in the bathroom wrapping his face in duct tape, or maybe putting ON the tape helmet he’d earlier taken off the dude? I don’t know.
Ronnie thinks this is as weird as I do, but he has no other friends really and might want more crack, so.
Ricky Martin remains artfully burnished, and has a matching robe and swim trunks. His whole storyline is: Donatella hates him because he and G had an open relationship, and she thinks that introduced G to HIV/AIDS without giving him any of the things he wanted from life – like kids. Antonio then does some soul-searching and realizes he wants to stop swinging and marry Gianni somehow, because the oldest tragic plot device ever is to have your central couple realize it’s True Love right before one of them dies. (This might be accurate, though; I don’t know.)
I just thought you needed to see the tiling at the BOTTOM of the Versace pool.
Cathy Moriarty owns the pawn shop where Cunanan sells a stolen coin, and she is appropriately skeptical. I assume she’ll pop up as a witness as we go. This facial expression is my inner monologue almost all of the time.
There’s also a bit where Versace is on his front-facing balcony jawing jokingly with a drag queen dressed as Donatella (“I can’t let you in! One Donatella is enough!”). It really is amazing to think how accessible he was, and how safe he must have felt in this city that loved him. You just never see that anymore.
Although it is crazy to me that he didn’t have more security, even wandering around in plain clothes. Because Cunanan is here pictured skulking around outside, after having spent a day taking close-up photos of the gate and the house, and then he sets up camp and reads his Vogue book. A good guard or three might have noticed that.
And, here is the lace blouse Versace wears when Ricky Martin realizes he wants to stop banging random men and be monogomous and get married. Love is lace-blind, I guess.
Made with prurient audiences in mind, and appealing to the taste for schadenfreude, the FX Channel’s tabloid-style “American Crime Story” anthology series was never likely to dignify the momentous life, career, and death of Gianni Versace. Even allowing that The Assassination of Gianni Versace aspires to telling some kind of truth about the fatal shooting of Versace (Édgar Ramírez) by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) in Miami Beach on July 15, 1997, it was surely unnecessary to show repeated shots of the Italian designer lying in the morgue with a gaping hole in his cheek.
Short on insight
Such gratuitous graphic imagery is counterpointed with the miniseries’ biographical insipidity. Two episodes in so far, it has strained hard to avoid cluttering the story with psychological insight or to explain why Versace was the great designer he was. Writer Tom Rob Smith, who adapted the screenplay from Maureen Orth’s book about Versace and Cunanan, and director Ryan Murphy have paid only lip service to the fashion industry and Versace’s role in it.
There are gestures. In episode one, Versace is seen telling a model an anecdote about his dressmaker mother and explaining to the girl that his clothes are intended to enhance her appearance: “The most important thing is the look on your face.”
In a flashback to a 1990 meeting with Cunanan at the San Francisco Opera—a meeting that takes place in Cunanan’s head—Versace tells the fawning acolyte that he designed his first dresses for his sister Donatella, and perhaps still designs all of them for her. Since Donatello (Penélope Cruz) doesn’t make her grand entrance until after Versace is dead, this mention serves to smuggle her in ahead of time.
Mystery illness
Finally, in episode two, we see some runway action. After overcoming a mystery illness—the series irresponsibly implies that Versace was HIV positive—Versace designs a collection to celebrate life, which makes him disdain the gloomy models Donatella has chosen because, after all, “Life is special! Life is precious!” and his vision for Woman is “She shall be proud! She shall be strong!”
His designs for a sparkly red minidress and gold and silver numbers earn enthusiastic applause. But this is the Mickey Mouse version of Versace’s vocation. There is not a hint of sophistication, which makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace the polar opposite of Paul Thomas Anderson’s fashion-world film Phantom Thread.
Nor in there any thematic complexity. Initially, the miniseries it is set up to juxtapose Versace’s wealth and fame with Cunanan’s poverty and obscurity. The opening sequence cuts between Versace padding around his opulent Miami Beach mansion at breakfast-time like a Roman emperor, with Cunanan (four murders under his belt already) squatting on the beach and fingering his copy of The Man Who Was Vogue and the automatic handgun in his backpack—a trope unnecessarily repeated in episode two.
This “us and them” idea feeds the contrast between Versace as a self-made man with purpose and Cunanan as a man who recognizes he has accomplished nothing and has no purpose. This is not enough to explain his motives for killing Versace. A shot of a sore on his leg when he’s on the beach may indicate he thought he had AIDS and had embarked on a campaign to kill rich homosexuals, Versace being the acme of an “out” gay man who has achieved the American Dream. Yet Cunanan’s autopsy revealed he was HIV negative.
The show wanly attempts to explain Cunanan’s makeup. A conversation with the off-on college boyfriend who loves him suggests that Cunanan was molested when he was an altar boy, which may be a factor in his psychopathy. During his imaginary conversation with Versace at the opera, Cunanan—a pathological liar—sneers at the memory of his father running off with one of the male pineapple plantation workers he employed in the Philippines. Imagined or not, his dad’s infidelity with another boy would translate as an Oedipal defeat for Andrew, a hard cross for any young gay man to bear.
Extra sordid
The Assassination of Gianni Versace, dependent on flashbacks, is not structurally well-organized. Episode one—which encompasses Versace’s murder and Cunanan’s Lee Harvey Oswald-like flight—sustains interest. Episode two, which begins with Cunanan driving from South Carolina to Miami in a stolen pick-up truck, dissolves into a series of longueurs.
It is enlivened by his budding friendship with an HIV-positive junkie, Ronnie (movingly played by Max Greenfield), and rendered extra-sordid by his menacing of a wealthy old client in a hotel room. Mostly, though, Cunanan mooches around Miami Beach stalking Versace. He first glimpses the designer refusing admittance of a Donatello lookalike—”One Donatella is enough!”—to the mansion. This is the series’ funniest moment; otherwise, it is humorless. The police procedural threaded throughout the miniseries is half-baked, lacking any kind of dynamism.
Against this, the performances are good. Ramirez is a dead ringer for Versace and captures the designer’s mostly understated manner. Ricky Martin is smooth and plausible as Versace’s longtime live-in boyfriend Antonio D’Amico, who shortly before the killing shows Versace that he wants to commit to a monogamous relationship with him instead of bringing home dancers and models for sex. Cruz captures Donatella’s self-dramatizing presence and the ice in her veins, though it is surprising that the producers didn’t give her a black panther—or even two—to lead around on a diamond-encrusted gold chain.
Broken soul
As the protagonist Cunanan, Criss has a hard job making the audience follow a man who suffers delusions of grandeur. It does not help the actor’s cause that he plays Cunanan as someone who simpers, preens, shows off, and commits heinous acts of savage violence. While it would be hard to make Cunahan a progressive gay character, some restraint was called for. It is not a bad performance, but it is a problematic one, since the viewer needs to find—if not a modicum of empathy with this broken soul—a reason to understand him.
Last week’s premiere episode planted the seeds for the plot and the thematic elements we will follow all season: Andrew Cunanan’s simultaneous magnetic charm and deep sense of isolation, Gianni Versace’s obsession with living fully and beautifully, and Donatella’s practical approach to both fashion and her brother.
In the second episode we dive deeper into each of these, stepping back to the months before Cunanan assassinated Versace to get a sense of the mental and emotional state that each of the players found themselves in before the tragedy…
Episode 2: “Manhunt”
The teaser of the episode is a telling glimpse into Gianni’s outlook about his own sickness, and more specifically, Antonio D’Amico and Donatella’s relationship around it.
Years before he was to be murdered, Gianni’s complications from HIV have made him sick and terrified of death, exacerbated by the memories of a younger sister that passed away. This leads to a confrontation between Donatella and Antonio, in which she blames him for dragging her brother into a life promiscuity, and failing to earn her respect.
As we cut back to the days after the assassination, we see that the relationship between Gianni’s now-widowed partner and his sister is not to improve. This is one of the best performed moments of the series so far, with both Ricky Martin and Penelope Cruz injecting pain, vulnerability, and anger into a loss.
This is also the only sequence of the episode that takes place after the murder, as we cut back to that earlier March to see the first weeks of Cunanan in Miami. This season seems to be taking a Memento-like approach to the narrative, in which every episode will take place shortly before the last; to inform and reveal its motives and consequences. It’s a smart method, though a bit confusing at times, that I hope will feel smoother as the season progresses.
Most of the episode focuses on Cunanan’s arrival to Miami, and his strategic approach to get closer to Versace. He moves into a seedy hotel by the beach, charming his way into an ocean-view room (Darren Criss is so good at playing someone who lies and charms for a living). He befriends another guest named Ronnie, played with supporting nuance and heart by New Girl’s Max Greenfield. He is an HIV+ man who the world has been too tough on, and finds unexpected connection and solace on Andrew; an affection that is never reciprocated. Ronnie is just another pawn in Cunanan’s chess game.
We also learn that, by that point, he was already in the FBI’s most wanted list for a series of murder committed through the States (and that will be explored in future episodes), and that the cops were not being effective in catching him. Flyers are not being distributed, suspects and places of interest are not being explored, and Cunanan keeps sneaking away. It took the murder of one of the nation’s most iconic fashion designers for the police to take this seriously.
We check in with Versace on the months before his death: Antonio wants to close their famously open relationship to settle down with him, and Gianni doesn’t fully believe him. And, in another immaculate scene between Edgar Ramirez and Penelope Cruz, the siblings fight before a fashion show about whether clothes should be constantly evolving or be born from the sentiments of the designer. Donatella is proven wrong. This is a display of Versace’s commitment and dedication to his craft, and how he treats every relationship in his life with the same principles.
Overall, the second episode gets us deeper into the psychology of the characters: the bubbling desperation and psychopathy underneath Cunanan’s effortless charm (his dancing as he held the old man captive in the bed was equally exhilarating, sexy, and disturbing), Antonio’s longing for a real relationship, and Donatella’s love and miscomprehension for his brother’s life.
The plotting, narrative aspect thus far has not been as relevant as you think it’d be in a show about an assassination, and it has yet to study social issues as broadly and sharply as OJ did (it attempted a little around HIV stigma, but it was very scattered). So far the season looks more like a deep character study than social commentary, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Next week we go back further in time. Any guesses what wig Penelope will be wearing?
@seriescanalplus: Rencontre avec le cast de l’une des séries les plus attendues de l’année : Penélope Cruz, @MattBomer et @DarrenCriss 🔥 “American Crime Story : The Assassination of Gianni Versace” en mars sur CANAL+ et le premier épisode en exclusivité sur myCANAL http://bit.ly/VersacemyCANAL
Meeting with the cast of one of the most anticipated of the year series: Penelope Cruz, @MattBomer and @DarrenCriss 🔥 “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” on March on CANAL + and the first episode only on myCANAL http://bit.ly/VersacemyCANAL
American Crime Story S02E02 (Manhunt) – the Atelier Versace fall 1997 collection – with the cross as recurring motif – was recreated with an incredible attention to details. This was the last collection designed by Gianni Versace
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