American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace tries to test the viewer’s appetite for classical beauty. In long, slow, largely wordless sequences, Ryan Murphy’s camera pans over the ornate tiling of the Versace villa, over the sun-kissed pastel facades of ’90s Miami Beach, and over the speedo-clad bodies that inhabited both. The lens will swoop and dive through a cavernous club populated by shirtless men in angel wings, or it will hover, gnat-like, right up against Penélope Cruz’s face. Often, in these moments, the sound of opera plays.
The follow-up to 2016’s award-and-acclaim-and-audience-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson spirals out from the 1997 morning when the designer Gianni Versace was gunned down by a serial killer and escort named Andrew Cunanan. Versace, we’re told early on by his sister Donatella (Cruz), had “a weakness for beauty.” The show is clearly hoping that audiences will share that stereotypically Italian trait as it channels Federico Fellini and The Godfather. Murphy is more of a workman than a high artist, though, and his meanderings here muddle an intrinsically strange, socially resonant story.
There are indeed some pungent visuals, including when Versace’s lacquered coffin is licked by the flames of an incinerator, and when a procedural police interview is made surreal by an outrageous backdrop. Yet Murphy’s wide-ranging catalogue (Glee, American Horror Story, The Normal Heart) has been more defined by the grotesque than by the gorgeous, and his methods often feel cheap. Whether with chalkboard-scratch strings overused to inject suspense, or with scene-dominating monologues spewing out exposition, he leans on the tricks of industrialized TV to a deadening extent. Last year, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope showcased a truer episodic tribute to baroque (and yes, Italian) sensibility: forceful, hypnotic, uncompromising. By contrast, Murphy’s lavishly decorated wall dressings feels like, well, wall dressing.
Which means the viewer might zonk out before getting to the good stuff. Murphy’s grand ambitions extend to not only surfaces but also structure, and the show threads together pre-murder and post-murder timelines as well as a multiplicity of points of view. Occasionally this is confusing—especially because Cunanan was hunted by the cops both before and after the shooting. But by the end of the second episode, the rhythms of the show make themselves clear, and the audience should be able to lock in.
The Versace household itself, even when depicted before the tragedy, provides plenty of intrigue. Murphy—ever-gawking at the human instinct to gawk—dramatizes the public fascination with the opulence Versace created, the sensibility clash between designer siblings (Gianni and Donatella), and the supposed salaciousness of a powerful gay man’s lifestyle in a less tolerant era. As Gianni lay dying on the steps of his villa, according to the show, one passerby ran to snap a polaroid and then auctioned it off to the media. Another bystander did something even more crass.
Ricky Martin’s performance as Antonio D’Amico, Gianni’s romantic partner of 15 years, is stiff but believable enough. The cops and the show take a somewhat leering interest in the question of whether his character was exploiting Versace while turning their home into a revolving sex salon, or if he was simply, lovingly, helping to fulfill the designer’s desires. Cruz’s Donatella doesn’t arrive until late in the first episode, but when she does it brings a much-needed note of contrast. She’s hard-minded where D’Amico is emotional, swathed in black amid her brother’s multi-hued garden.
Darren Criss’s Cunanan is positioned as a monster conman in a rich American lineage that includes Patrick Bateman and Donald Trump. He lies insistently, enthusiastically, and imaginatively, and even though he’s evading attention from viewers of the FBI mouthpiece America’s Most Wanted, he simultaneously brags that he’s “the person least likely to be forgotten.” As a killer prostitute, the character offers the means through which Murphy can indulge his American Horror Story side to explore how the closet can enable atrocities. While the show plays coy about Cunanan’s motivations, you get a sense that gnawing shame and a need for validation helped create him—and that he knew how his pretty face afforded him a measure of social armor.
But smartly, Murphy reserves a lot of empathy for the character who might have stood in as the bigger symbol of surface worship, Gianni Versace himself. His family has disavowed the series, based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book Vulgar Favors, as tawdry and inaccurate. Yet the murder victim is played with real gentleness and sensitivity by Édgar Ramírez, who also nails Versace’s physical look. It’s not prettiness itself that motivated his work, we’re told, but family, loyalty, and a desire to serve. Getting the most out of American Crime Story will similarly mean looking past the frescoes and fabrics to the plight of people whose ken for beauty fascinated a sick man and—Murphy argues—a sick society.
Tag: january 2018
How ‘American Crime Story’ Re-created Versace’s Death — on the Designer’s Own Front Steps
[This story contains spoilers from the premiere of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.]
From the start, the producers behind FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story wanted the series to be different than other true-crime shows.
“The series opens with the murder of Versace, and we made that decision for a couple reasons. One is that it’s the one fact that everybody knows about this case — that Gianni Versace, if you know something, you know that he was murdered outside his mansion. We felt like, instead of waiting eight episodes to get to that, let’s go right toward that, which then led to this backwards storytelling. We’re telling this season backwards,” executive producer Brad Simpson tells The Hollywood Reporter.
That’s why Wednesday’s premiere opened with a lush, nearly eight-minute sequence detailing the final morning of the slain fashion designer’s life, culminating in the moment when 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) shot Versace (Edgar Ramirez) on the steps of the designer’s Miami Beach mansion — which the production re-created on the actual steps of the building.
“Everyone was very moved because we didn’t make the steps, we shot on those steps,” Ramirez tells THR. “He laid on those steps, and Antonio [D’Amico, his partner] might have picked him up in the way Ricky [Martin, who plays D’Amico] did with me. And there’s something very moving and interesting and disturbing to me because Gianni was shot around 8:30 or so that morning … so he was alive. I was playing somebody who’s dying, I wasn’t playing dead.”
Says Martin, “It was very dark. It was very heavy and dark days because it was back to back, the actual finding of the corpse and then the investigation where the FBI just drills him, merciless. But I loved it because the mission was important in a sense — I’m telling this story because people need to know this story.”
Season two of the FX anthology from exec producer Ryan Murphy was a big departure from the franchise’s O.J. Simpson-focused first season, when the Emmy-winning limited series re-created most of its major locations on soundstages.
“What’s important about filming at the mansion is that it reflected how Versace lived his life,” Simpson says. “Versace’s mansion is in South Beach, right on a public beach. You open the door, and the entire world is out there. That’s how he wanted to live — not just authentically, but openly. He loved stepping outside and being among all the different characters in South Beach — the multiple ethnicities, people who were open with their sexuality — it was part of what inspired him. That walk that he did every morning, the walk that we begin with to get the newspaper, was something he hadn’t been able to do for several years because he had been sick, and now he was better. It meant so much to him. The tragedy that this thing that he loved, the openness with which he could live, is how he was able to be murdered, was incredibly important to represent.”
But being in the actual house, which Versace created himself, was invaluable to the show’s creative team.
“When we were in there with our craftsmen and our writers and everything, you felt that vibe coming through, and it felt important to shoot it there,” Simpson says. “At the same time, it’s incredibly chilling. The day that we re-created it, we created it as it happened. Everyone was very somber. People were crying because you could feel the energy of what we were re-creating right there in the moment.”
For Criss, the most striking part of filming that scene in the actual location was the fact that he gained the access to Versace’s life that Cunanan desperately craved.
“I so freely walked in. Me, Darren, just walking right through the gates and into a nice air-conditioned room on a really hot summer’s day,” Criss tells THR. “Andrew never made it inside, which has a more symbolic meaning — he literally and figuratively never got to go inside. There I was, dressed in the same clothes that he was in, re-enacting the scene that would forever define him in opposition of the Versaces, and there I am, walking in their house.”
“That felt very strange to me,” he continues. “It was surreal, but it made it very real, for sure. Being in that house was almost like being in a church because Versace was so present in that house. I found myself saying a silent prayer to Gianni and asking his forgiveness, not on behalf of Andrew, but I guess of hoping that he would be trusting of us telling this story and that we would try and create something with light that had so much darkness.”
How ‘American Crime Story’ Re-created Versace’s Death — on the Designer’s Own Front Steps
stellamccartney: When a friend dressed as a friend facetimes you… confused.com! x Stella
American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not
Murphy understands that Miami is as gaudy, gay, and greedy as the characters he’s put onscreen. Yes, we certainly have more depth than that (as numerous films, from the Oscar-winning Moonlight to Borscht Corp’s award-winning shorts, have shown). But the surface-level charm is prevalent, often hiding that depth from outsiders. In Versace, Murphy leans deeply into the façade.
Still, Versace, like Miami, seems to promise more than surface-level charms. It’s not just the gorgeous visuals or Penélope Cruz playing Donatella Versace without attempting to hide her Spanish accent. It’s not just Édgar Ramírez working on beautiful Versace costumes for an opera or having his shirt logo sliced open on a hospital table in the most heavy-handed death scene ever. And it’s not just Ricky Martin as Antonio D’Amico wailing for an ambulance while holding his dying lover as though they were Michelangelo’s Pietà. Versace writer Tom Rob Smith has used Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S. History as a jumping-off point to create a portrait of this place that’s as loving and as critical as it should be.
The beauty of the pilot episode is in the details, its slow but smart establishing of the period we’re entering. This is the queer ‘90s: There’s sex, nightlife, and drugs. There’s also an AIDS epidemic that people still had no real clue how to deal with. It’s implied in scenes showing Versace pulling up his robe to reveal a lesion and taking medication that he was dealing with AIDS. That unease buzzes beneath scenes in which a police officer can barely communicate with D’Amico during questioning because he can’t grasp the concept of two men dating, much less two men in an open relationship. It’s in the word “faggot” written on a public beach bathroom wall.
With the episode “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” American Crime Story delivers a promising premiere, one that announces an unashamed exploration of what it meant to be gay in the 1990s, even if it’s told partially through the lens of a sociopath who murdered at least five people during that period. We can only hope the rest of the series is as exciting as the first episode.
American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 1 Recap: Starting With a Bang
Mere minutes pass in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story until Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) assassinates Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez). This is your first clue that you’re not really watching a show about Gianni Versace.
Welcome to Ryan Murphy’s latest exploration of 1990s celebrity crime. After sufficiently dazzling everyone with his take on a well-known story — the murder trial of O.J. Simpson — Murphy has chosen to take a broader, more difficult swing. He’s named the series after the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, I assume largely because it was Cunanan’s most high-profile killing. But Cunanan, and thus Criss, takes center stage in this story. The relatively balanced storytelling that puts both Cunanan and the Versaces in the spotlight this episode won’t return until we’re nearly through our nine-episode-long journey.
Criss gets plenty to do in this premiere installment: the killing, meeting Versace at a nightclub in San Francisco, stalking him to the San Francisco Opera, and even revealing his butt! But we’ll be talking mostly about him in the following weeks.
So let’s take this opportunity to focus on the Versace side of things; in particular, Penelope Cruz as Gianni’s sister, the iconic Donatella Versace.
Cruz as Donatella doesn’t step into the episode until it’s nearly over, arriving in Miami Beach via private plane upon hearing of her brother’s murder. Murphy, who directed this episode, frames her in a way perhaps only a gay man could: reverent, awestruck. Even the stairs descending from her private plane are shot with epic sweep. You’d feel compelled to let out a YAS if she weren’t there to identify the body of her dead brother.
Donatella is emotional upon arrival in her face, but none of that carries over to her body. She’s outfitted in the House of Versace’s finest, her long, blonde hair cascading over gorgeous leather. When she steps out of her limo upon arriving at the Versace residence at night, She wears sunglasses, so as to hide her tear-filled eyes from the paparazzi.
She is a wounded warrior; her brother’s clothes are her armor.
When you first hear Cruz’s take on Donatella’s accent, it sounds downright bizarre. It’s like she’s taken a long drag of a cigarette and is holding the smoke in her throat at all times. But that’s fitting; Donatella’s is a nearly impenetrable accent, which the fashion icon herself knows all too well.
Explaining her method of replicating Donatella’s speech back in October, Cruz told People she thinks the female Versace’s accent is “Italian with a very international flavor — very rock ’n’ roll.” That description doesn’t really mean anything until you hear it; once you do, it makes perfect sense, and matches the character’s presentation perfectly. Donatella sounds hardened, but her voice falters easily. She’s strong, but with tremendous emotion bursting at the seams.
After a few scenes of barely holding it together, Donatella lets her guard down, if only slightly, in a meeting with Versace’s board. She speaks emotionally but firmly about her brother, and the ways in which he will live on through his brand. “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice,” she says, words trembling as they leave her mouth, tears welling in her eyes.
In her final scene of the episode, Donatella shuts down the planned public offering of the House of Versace. Gianni wanted it, and delaying would likely prevent the House from trying again for years. (Indeed, the company is still working to go public in present day.) It’s bad for business, but right for the moment.
“This is not a time for strangers,” Donatella insists. “This is a time for family.” And that’s Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith’s idea of her in a nutshell: Donatella loves her brother deeply, and loves the people who work at the House. But she trusts no one else — her armor is fully secured to avoid giving the public an inch of herself.
Cruz will pop up in a few scenes here and there over the next few episodes, including one crucial story about Donatella and Gianni’s creative collaboration. But this first impression was her moment: how Donatella, icy goddess with a fiery heart, protected herself against the pain of her brother’s death.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 1 Recap: Starting With a Bang
Recapping the First Episode of ‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’
The first thing you need to know about FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it’s not really about Gianni Versace. While O.J. Simpson—and his fame, his race and his abusive history—were central to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology in its first season, this story focuses on the man who killed Versace and the society that aided in that murder.
The new season is based on Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, a 450-page tome the journalist Maureen Orth published in 1999. Much of the book is devoted to the life story of Cunanan, the 27-year-old spree killer who shot Versace in 1997. Her reporting is thorough and revealing, but much of her analysis is dated. When Orth explores Cunanan’s demimonde of meth, escorts, sugar daddies and BDSM, it feels as though she’s unaware that this milieu isn’t representative of gay male culture as a whole.
Especially considering that Murphy—who is gay and has created some groundbreaking queer characters—has also been known to perpetuate the occasional homophobic stereotypes, the interplay between the book and the series is bound to give us plenty to discuss. At the very least, Vulgar Favors is handy for determining which parts of the show are confirmed fact and which are purely conjecture. (I’ll also be using Deborah Ball’s House of Versace, a breezy history of Gianni, his family, and the brand from 2010, along with a few other sources.)
I don’t want to call these recaps “fact-checks,” though, because fiction doesn’t have any responsibility to stick to the official record. Instead, I’ll look at how the discrepancies between what Orth dug up and what Murphy depicts reveal the show’s real agenda. These pieces may take a different form from week to week, but since the premiere was mostly a reenactment of the crime and its immediate aftermath, we’ll start with some pretty basic background stuff.
July 15, 1997
Orth’s book ends with the death of Versace and the intensified hunt for Cunanan, who had already killed four men by the time he came to Miami Beach. American Crime Story begins with the murder and goes backward from there. It’s a promising approach, because the real suspense here is in the question of how the smart, charismatic, cultured young man we meet in flashbacks ended up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
The show sticks fairly close to the facts in recounting what happened on the day Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) died. He really was returning home from an early-morning excursion to buy magazines when Andrew, played by Darren Criss in a performance that’s already riveting, gunned him down on the steps of his palatial home (more on that later). One bullet also killed a turtle dove—a symbol that initially led authorities to suspect a Mafia hit. While Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), stayed at the designer’s side, the couple’s neighbor Lazaro Quintana chased Andrew until Andrew pulled a gun on him. Versace was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead at 9:21 AM.
Cops really did spot someone who matched Andrew’s description on the roof of a parking garage around the same time, but he escaped. (Orth doesn’t mention them tackling the wrong man.) It’s not clear what he was doing later that day, when police found the stolen red truck Andrew had abandoned and he became the suspect. The scenes that show him changing into fresh clothes and watching gleefully as the media descends on Versace’s house aren’t just plausible; they underscore how easily Andrew blended in among the town’s gay beachgoers.
One character to keep an eye on is FBI agent Keith Evans (Jay R. Ferguson). The Bureau was searching for Cunanan long before he killed Versace, and Evans was its man in Miami. Sadly, he was also inexperienced and unfamiliar with the city’s gay community. Sgt. Lori Wieder, the lesbian cop played by Dascha Polanco, wasn’t on the scene that day, but the officers who were there did find boxes of undistributed Wanted flyers in Evans’ trunk. The scene where the pawnshop owner complains to police about the legally mandated transaction form she’d filed a week earlier, which included Cunanan’s full name, is another embarrassing real-life detail. But the emphasis Murphy, who directed the episode, places on Evans’ neglect of his assignment is crucial, because it’s the first suggestion that law enforcement’s homophobia—its literal fear of engaging with gay men—contributed to its failure.
October 1990
Did Versace really know his killer? Well, sort of.
It’s true that Versace designed the costumes for a production of Capriccio at the San Francisco Opera, and stayed in the city during its run in 1990. At the time, Cunanan was living rent-free in Berkeley with his friend Liz Coté (Annaleigh Ashford), who Orth describes as a “rich and spacey debutante,” and her husband, Phil Merrill (Nico Evers-Swindell)—the couple we see in the flashback. A fixture in SF’s gay scene, Andrew met Versace at a club called Colossus. But, Orth reports, it was the designer who approached him: “I know you,” said Versace. “Lago di Como, no?” he asked, referring to his Italian lake house. It was, most likely, a flimsy pickup line. Andrew, who’d never been to Italy but had also never heard a flattering lie he couldn’t get behind, went along with it. On another night, Versace, Andrew, and a local playboy named Harry de Wildt were spotted together in a limo.
That dreamy encounter after the opera, though? It’s pure fantasy, although Andrew was known to lie about his Filipino father knowing Imelda Marcos, owning pineapple plantations and having a boyfriend. What’s important here is the conversation about Andrew’s future. “You are creative?” Versace asks, and his date answers in the affirmative. In fact, the only things Andrew ever created were fictions about himself, passed off as fact. (I won’t get too deep into that, because his lying is sure to come up later in the show.) “I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day,” says Versace. The distance between Andrew’s ambitions and the life he ended up with—as well as the reasons why he was such a failure—is going to be important.
The Family Business
The episode’s strangest divergence from the facts comes during the same scene. Versace explains the history of his company’s Medusa logo, recounting that he first spotted the image while playing in ruins as a child in Calabria. In fact, as Ball notes in House of Versace, he borrowed his logo from a door knocker at the Milan palazzo he bought in 1981. Perhaps we’re supposed to suspect Versace is a liar, too, but I’m inclined to believe the line is pure exposition, a hint of the designer’s humble beginnings that will soon become relevant to Andrew’s story.
Meanwhile, Versace’s mourning siblings/business partners, Donatella (Penélope Cruz) and Santo (Giovanni Cirfiera) provide some insight into the company’s status in 1997. Poor Cruz, normally a fantastic actress, has a thankless role (and a distracting accent) in this episode. All she does is sob, scream and provide dry background info that writer Tom Rob Smith doesn’t bother surrounding with believable human dialogue. For the record, it’s true that Santo, the oldest Versace sibling and the company’s most pragmatic voice, wanted to take the business public. And Gianni, after accepting a large dividend to subsidize his lavish lifestyle, agreed to do so. The plan was to make an initial public offering in the summer of 1998. It never happened. Two decades later, Gianni Versace S.p.A. remains a billion-dollar private company. None of this is particularly interesting, so here’s hoping it becomes relevant to the Cunanan story eventually!
Gianni Versace’s Fucking Insane House
There isn’t much art in this workmanlike premiere, but it does begin with a shot of the clouds painted over Versace’s bed that leads to a lovely, nearly wordless sequence contrasting Gianni’s civilized morning with Andrew’s primal scream. If you paid attention to the Renaissance-style art and the stained-glass windows and the gold accents and the massive tiled courtyard, it probably occurred to you that Versace’s home was totally off the wall. (“If Donald Trump had taste,” I said to myself, “this is what Mar-a-Lago would look like.”) Surely it was exaggerated for TV?
Actually, it was not. Built in 1930, Casa Casuarina, as the home was known, was inspired by Christopher Columbus’s son Diego’s residence in the Dominican Republic. In the courtyard of the 20,000-square-foot villa were busts of Columbus, Pocahontas, Mussolini and Confucius (all of which Versace kept). After Versace bought the property in 1992, he spent a million dollars restoring it. An army of artists and artisans filled the place with murals, mosaics and baroque furniture. Versace published a typically bizarre coffee-table book about his many bonkers properties in 1996, and in it you can find photos of the family frolicking poolside at Casa Casuarina alongside busy interiors and shots of naked men ironing. My favorite page shows a close-up of a burger, fries and a milkshake served on gilded Versace china, atop an ornate gold table. America! If you can’t track down a copy, this Google Image search should give you an idea. Look, here’s a bare-assed dude with a lampshade over his head! See you next week!
Recapping the First Episode of ‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’
Edgar Ramirez’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace Highlights ‘90s Homophobia
Edgar Ramirez talks about how The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story exposes homophobia in the U.S. that allowed five murders to go unchecked 20 years ago and discovering he looks like the famous fashion designer’s doppelgänger. | 17 January 2018
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Darren Criss’s killer performance — and the stories of lesser-known victims — are the main events of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story | Uncle Barky’s Bytes
FX’s second American Crime Story entry could be far more accurately titled The Dissection of Andrew Cunanan.
But in the realm of readily recognizable names, that doesn’t ring many chimes. So it’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace, even though Cunanan is the driving force while two of his other younger victims – there were five in all – get fuller treatments than the iconic fashion designer.
Former Glee star Darren Criss inhabits Cunanan with more flash and impact than any model who ever wore one of Versace’s creations. He’s alternately chilling, pathetic, conniving and deluded without ever being visibly remorseful. It’s a fully committed, crazily energetic performance that carries this nine-part miniseries through its peaks, valleys and at times disjointed timeline. Assassination of Gianni Versace also is very nice to look at, except when the corpses left behind are not.
Ryan Murphy, lately the busiest man in Hollywood, again shows that he’s generally on firmer ground when dramatizing real-life events rather than fictionally concocting them in series such as Nip/Tuck, Scream Queens, Fox’s new 9-1-1 and FX’s ongoing and very uneven American Horror Storyanthology series.
His first American Crime Story deservedly won a wealth of major awards with its up-close look at the O.J. Simpson trial. The deliciously bombastic Feud: Bette and Joan, likewise for FX, and the HBO movie The Normal Heart, also were almost uniformly critically praised. Murphy’s biggest fictional triumph, Fox’s Glee, notably stayed away from physical gore and succeeded as an empowering high school musical series.
Assassination of Gianni Versace, adapted primarily from Maureen Orth’s 1999 book Vulgar Favors, is fact-based but clearly not averse to taking liberties in depicting Cunanan’s “journey” from vainglorious poser to cold-blooded serial killer. Eight of the nine chapters were made available for review. And composition-wise, the storytellers err in waiting all the way until the eighth hour to detail Cunanan’s destructive upbringing at the hands of an abusive, duplicitous father (Jon Jon Briones as Modesto “Pete” Cunanan) and terrified mother (Joanna Adler in the role of Mary Ann Cunanan). The “sissy kid with a sissy mind,” as Pete puts it in a climactic scene, is put a path to self-destruction but never really toward self-awareness.
It all begins on July 15, 1997, with Versace (Edgar Ramirez) waking up to another day in his splendorous Miami Beach mansion. Servants await him. But he also willingly walks the nearby streets, giving off an air of accessibility while also politely declining an autograph request.
By the end of the first hour he’s dead and on a slab, his face gruesomely disfigured from a point-blank bullet wound. Versace’s partner of 15 years, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), is inconsolable. But the deceased’s steely sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), dismisses D’Amico with contempt as a leech whose contributions were less than minimal. She’s now determined to protect the Versace company by keeping it privately held.
“They’ll judge the killer, yes,” she says. “But they’ll judge the victim, too.”
This lays the groundwork of much of what is yet to come. Being gay in the late 1990s was still a considerable detriment, business-wise and otherwise. Versace, Cunanan and three of his other victims were all gay, with only the killer unabashedly coming out as a high schooler.
The subsequent story of Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) is especially poignant. He was proudly a Navy officer until being “found out” and thrown out. Trail’s eventual ill-fated involvement with Cunanan encompasses several episodes, as does the back story of David Madson (Cody Fern). Both ran afoul of Cunanan’s rages after recognizing him as a fraud and “betraying” him. Chapter 4, subtitled “House By the Lake,” telescopes Cunanan and David at the height of the latter’s fear of him. It’s one of the most powerfully chilling hours of television you’ll ever see – if you have the wherewithal to see it through.
Assassination of Gianni Versace includes two other veteran, recognizable actors, Judith Light and Mike Farrell. For an earlier generation they respectively were the stars of Who’s the Boss? and M*A*S*H. In Chapter 3, they’re paired as Chicago’s very prosperous Lee and Marilyn Miglin. She peddles her perfumes on home shopping networks while he’s a developer with designs on constructing the tallest building Chicago has ever seen. But Lee is also a closeted gay man who can’t get enough of Cunanan. They get together again while his wife is on a road trip. “I feel like I’m alive,” he tells Cunanan after they kiss. Well, not for long. Farrell’s performance is first-rate, but Light steals the episode as the all-business Marilyn, particularly after her husband’s mutilated body is found.
Although her time on-screen is limited, Cruz makes some strong impressions as the ever-demanding Donatella Versace. But Martin’s characterization of D’Amico is too one-note and largely inconsequential to really register. Ramirez has some solid scenes as Gianni, but doesn’t resonate nearly as strongly as Cunanan’s three other principal victims.
The pursuit of Cunanan, who’s already known to authorities before he murders Versace, is barely a subplot of the first eight chapters. Some viewers may become restive in the process. But the to-and-fro timeline serves both the stories of Cunanan and his victims. Cress’s performance is a force throughout, but not to the point of “humanizing” Cunanan at the expense of those whose lives he took with varying degrees of glee. The deaths of Jeff Trail and David Madson in particular hurt deeply.
This second installment of American Crime Story, which jumped ahead of a planned look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is unlikely to match the ratings or impact of the O. J. Simpson opener. Andrew Cunanan is a no-name killer in comparison, as are all but one of those whose lives he took so violently. So yes, Gianni Versace’s murder is the overall reason this miniseries came about in the first place. But no, he’s not nearly the half of it.
GRADE: B+
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