Tag: january 2018

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Review: Darren Criss Kills It As Gay Serial Killer Andrew Cunanan

Let’s just get this out of the way upfront, since the comparison is inevitable: The Assassination of Gianni Versace doesn’t quite reach the heights of The People vs. O.J. Simpson. But so what?

The second season of FX’s American Crime Story was never going to be as richly textured as the first, if only because Simpson’s “trial of the century” was so much more significant as a cultural event. The verdict was a defining American moment, the kind where you remember where you were when you heard it. So through no fault of its own, Versace never really stood a chance against its Emmy-winning ACS sibling. And yet, on its own merits, Versace makes for addictive, phenomenal television. I was hooked from the opening scene, in which director Ryan Murphy and series writer Tom Rob Smith dispense with the titular murder, getting it out of the way early before working their way backwards, tracing how this tragic crime came to pass.

Much like how the first season of ACS wasn’t really about O.J. Simpson, neither is the second season really about Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace. Instead, it inverts the first season’s formula and shifts its focus from the courtroom to the crime spree and the man behind it, Andrew Cunanan. This creative choice isn’t necessarily what I was expecting given Versace‘s marketing materials, which from the very start, have trumpeted the casting of Edgar Ramirez as Gianni and Penelope Cruz as Donatella. And yet it proves to be a wise decision, since to be honest, the power struggle within the House of Versace isn’t half as interesting as the walking question mark that is Cunanan.

So let’s talk about the actual star of the show, Darren Criss. I know Criss is a big TV star thanks to Murphy’s earlier hit Glee, and he has two million Twitter followers and he’s a very famous guy. But I’m a professional entertainment consumer and I’d never seen him in anything before (though I almost rented Girl Most Likely once), so as far as I was concerned, he felt completely new to me, as I imagine he will to a lot of people who didn’t watch Glee. I suspect that those who did watch it won’t recognize ‘Blaine’ once they see Criss covered in blood, a crazed look in his empty eyes. He’s simply excellent here as Cunanan, a gay serial killer in the vein of Matt Damon’s talented Mr. Ripley, but of course, this manipulative sociopath with a 147 IQ is hardly a work of fiction. Criss is absolutely chilling here, and there’s a haunting sadness to his carefully calibrated breakout performance. I can’t say enough about Criss’ work, which will force you to look at the actor in a completely different light.

As for Versace, he’s reduced to a supporting character in his own story, not that I’m arguing, given how satisfying all of the Cunanan scenes are. In fact, the episodes that solely focus on Andrew are the best of the bunch, and the Versace thread tends to interrupt their momentum. Ramirez is magnetic as the formidable fashion designer, but he also plays Versace with a certain softness that serves as a nice antidote to Cunanan’s craziness. You really believe Ramirez and Cruz could be siblings when Gianni and Donatella spar over her role in his budding empire. You can see Donatella is tired of living in her brother’s shadow and eager to carve out her own identity within the fashion world, and Gianni sees this as well, offering her up to the cameras in an attempt to placate her ego. Ricky Martin plays the third wheel of this co-dependent relationship, Gianni’s longtime partner Antonio D’Amico, and while the pop singer does a fine job, their relationship is just dressing on the Cunanan salad.

The series endeavors to depict Versace and Cunanan as two men on opposite ends of a spectrum. Versace came from nothing and built his life into something of meaning. Cunanan had a reasonably happy childhood, and yet, his life quickly fell apart once he struck out on his own. That parallel is reflected in one of the episode titles, “Creator/Destroyer,” which presents the men as two sides of the same ruthlessly ambitious coin. The difference between them is that while Cunanan desperately wanted to lead the life of luxury that Versace enjoyed and most people only read about in magazines, he wasn’t willing to put in any of the hard work to actually earn it.

Cunanan may have been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list prior to the Versace murder, but he didn’t become infamous until he killed the fashion designer, relegating the rest of his victims to “other” status. That’s how they’re initially presented, too, since we don’t get to know what these people meant to Andrew until after we’ve learned he’s killed them, so it’s not until later that we come to understand how and why Cunanan could’ve done what he did. That’s if you can understand the killer’s warped thinking to begin with, given his knack for telling tall tales. The more lies Cunanan tells his friends, the more we realize he’s lying to himself, and he has no idea of who he really is anymore. He has lost his own sense of identity, drifting from one to the next as he zigzags his way across the country towards Versace’s opulent home in South Beach. For Cunanan, the greatest sin is to be boring and forgotten. Told all his life that he’s someone special, he’s stunned when others don’t see it, and Criss plays those moments of rejection quite beautifully.

The fourth episode of the season introduces Cunanan’s former lover, David Madson (hugely talented Australian actor Cody Fern, a real find) and David’s current beau, Jeffrey Trail (AHS alum Finn Wittrock), and you can’t underestimate their roles in this story, as the latter was Andrew’s first victim, the one who launched his multi-state crime spree. Trail gets his own half-episode (pointedly titled “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”) dedicated to the (mis)treatment of gays in the military, and while this statement of a subplot adds some context to how authorities (including the cops chasing Cunanan) regarded homosexuals 25 years ago, it also feels a bit shoehorned in. Like, what does this really have to do with Versace or Cunanan? ACS tries to make that connection, using cultural homophobia to explain law enforcement’s delayed search for Cunanan, but it feels a bit forced, though it’s clearly something that interested Murphy in the first place.

Versace is much more successful when it drills down into who Cunanan is, at least as much as one can, given the fact that the guy was a complete cypher of an human being — a gifted chameleon, if you will. A people pleaser, he could be whatever, and whoever, his friends/lovers/targets wanted him to be. That was his skill, if you will. The ability to adapt to any situation… though he also had a need for control. He cared how things looked to other people, and what they thought of him. Of course, to fully understand a man, you have to know where he comes from, and the series soars when it turns its lens on Andrew’s family, particularly his father, Modesto. Filipino actor Jon Jon Briones is utterly fantastic as Andrew’s father, who doted on his precocious child, whom he considered more special than his other kids. You can also see where Andrew might’ve learned his smooth-talking criminal behavior, as Modesto was a stockbroker who bilked people out of their money and abandoned his family when the feds came calling, fleeing back to the Philippines.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent from top to bottom. Mike Farrell and Judith Light are both incredible as slain Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin and his wife, Marilyn. When Miglin’s body is discovered, no one has to tell her what happened — she knows right away, her worst fears confirmed. Edouard Holdener also deserves praise as young Andrew, and Max Greenfield is unrecognizable in the second episode, which offers a reminder of what he can do with the right part.

This disturbing character study is based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, and in addition to Murphy, its directors include Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Nelson Cragg, Daniel Minahan (check out his directorial debut Series 7: The Contenders) and Matt Bomer, though costumer designer Lou Eyrich and production designer Judy Becker deserve equal praise for their lavish contributions.

I might as well use this space to address the recent controversy surrounding the series, which according to the Versace family, is unauthorized and full of inaccuracies.

“The Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace,” the family said in a statement. “Since Versace did not authorize the book on which it is partly based nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.”

I completely appreciate why they would be concerned about the series’ depiction of Gianni, and particularly his health, I wouldn’t describe the series as a work of fiction, though I’d acknowledge that surely, there must be small fictions within the show. Still, I didn’t watch FX’s Simpson series like it was Ezra Edelman’s O.J. documentary, and I’m not taking The Assassination of Gianni Versace as gospel, either. Yes, it’s based on a bestselling non-fiction book, but as a regular viewer of crime shows, I’m fully aware that Tom Rob Smith is allowed some degree of artistic license in bringing that book to the small screen.

I imagine that can be hard to comprehend when you’re as close to the story as the Versace family is, but if they take a step back — and I don’t even know if they’ve actually seen the series they’ve been so quick to criticize — they’d see there’s really no reason to be concerned. Gianni is depicted as a strong leader, one aware of his mortality and a better man for it. The producers, and Ramirez especially, treat him with the utmost respect, and once the Versace family sees the full series, I think their biggest issue will be with how the show sort of manipulates the audience into having sympathy for Andrew, more than it will be about the depiction of Gianni, which is generous and loving.

“There’s always this question of when you’re making and writing this kind of material – you feel like you want to support the fundamental truths. And you are going to get some of the details wrong, or you’re going to have to fill in a gap at some point, where you don’t have access to the reality. I think the only way you are allowed to do that is if you’re supporting the bigger truth… I’m sure there are points where they could correct some of the smaller details, but I think the bigger picture is that this is a figure that we’re celebrating and a figure that we all fell in love with,” Smith said at FX’s TCA panel, noting that that ultimately, “the show is full of love for him.”

He isn’t lying, nor is trying to justify why Cunanan killed, as the fact that he was gay is ultimately besides the point. This show is about a guy who wanted what another man had but didn’t have the skills or tools to get it, so he figured the only way to achieve the immortality he craved was by robbing one of his icons of his mortality, thus ensuring both would live forever, together, in the annals of history. I don’t care how much of this actually happened and how much is artistic license on Smith’s part. All I care about is whether or not it’s entertaining, and on that front, Versace delivers.

This is a fascinating story about the making of a serial killer. A murderer finding his voice. It marks Tom Rob Smith as a major writer to watch, and Darren Criss as a force to be reckoned with. He delivers one of the most terrifying serial killer performance since Christian Bale starred in American Psycho, though Cunanan also reminded me, at times, of The Tooth Fairy from Manhunter and the serial killer in Copycat.

“You know, disgrace isn’t that bad, once you’ve settled into it,” Andrew tells one of his victims. Well Andrew Cunanan may go down in infamy as a disgrace, but The Assassination of Gianni Versace is anything but.

TB gives it an A.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Review: Darren Criss Kills It As Gay Serial Killer Andrew Cunanan

TV Review: ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ on FX

Quite fittingly, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” begins with a sequence that feels timeless. The opening scenes of the first episode, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” are nearly devoid of dialogue, scored instead with a lush, operatic adagio that is reminiscent of an opulent, bygone age. The characters are introduced in ways that feel particularly timeless too: Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez), lord of his domain, wakes up in his sumptuous Miami Beach mansion — an Italian, baroque confection of luxury, staffed by dozens of uniformed servants and tanned, handsome men. Versace is the type of guy who takes his morning OJ on a silver tray, before reclining by the pool for a pre-lunch constitutional. His life is an incarnation of Italianate decadence, in a way that transcends his own time — the ’90s — to borrow, effortlessly, from luxury of yore.

Outside his haven, though, another story is unfolding. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), a skinny, bespectacled kid with a nervous, wiry energy, is pacing on the beach, opening up his backpack to look at the weapon nestled inside. He wades into the ocean and screams into the waves — his struggle pitched at a level of drama that only strings in a minor key can deliver. In between the elements of sand and sea he is reduced to his most essential state: a man on the edge of the world. And then the inevitable happens, in a scene that is shot by director Ryan Murphy like a fateful collision: Cunanan shoots Versace right outside the gates of the mansion.

The piece is the Adagio in G Minor, as arranged by show composer Mac Quayle. That the work is a well-known piece of musical chicanery seems especially fitting — a work passed off as an early-18th-century fragment that mimics baroque composition but was instead written in the middle of the 20th. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” tells the story of homophobia in the late ’90s through a modern-day lens, but like so much of creator Murphy’s work, it is also interested in erasing the boundaries between the present and the past, often by heightening the drama of both.

From the moment of Versace’s murder, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” spools not forward but backward. In a brilliant device imperfectly rendered, every new episode of the show happens chronologically before the previous, in a “Memento”-style telling that is chasing some essential truth about its shapeshifting, mysterious killer. And for a show that has Gianni Versace’s name in the title, Ramírez’s (excellent) performance takes up much less real estate than the story of Andrew Cunanan — pathological liar, spree killer and terrifyingly effective con man, who killed himself before ever fully explaining his motives to the police. The FX series is based on Maureen Orth’s book “Vulgar Favors” — which emphasizes not just Cunanan’s path to the steps of Versace’s mansion but also how his manhunt was botched by the authorities, partly because of the simple fact that Cunanan was gay. But despite the law-and-order mechanics of the first season of “American Crime Story,” “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” opts for a story that emphasizes a titanic struggle of gay identity, ranging between the creative warmth of Versace, the corrosive shame of Cunanan’s earlier closeted victims and Cunanan’s own desperate striving. This isn’t a narrative about the mechanics of a trial, or even much about Versace himself, despite “American Crime Story’s” successful pedigree and this season’s subtitle. Rather, it takes the absence of details about Cunanan’s motivations and interprets a character from Orth’s framework.

The bulk of interpreting that character falls to writer Tom Rob Smith and actor Darren Criss, with mixed results. It’s hard to fault Criss for what is the most committed and impressive performance of his career, or Smith for assembling the facts about Cunanan into a narrative about the particular anxieties of gay identity in the ’90s. (Criss is practically born for this role: The actor, like Cunanan, is half Filipino.) It’s more that a murderer — particularly a murderer devoid of suspense, because we see him kill his most famous victim in the first scene — is a hard subject to extract eight hours of material from. That a creepy man will continue to be creepy — or that a scary man will continue to be scary — has a chilling effect for an audience investing in story. By the second time that Cunanan kills — which is, chronologically, the fourth time he kills — his presence in the home of Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) has the heightened-strings suspense of a horror flick, complete with some of that genre’s fear-inducing editing. Criss may be doing the very best job he is capable of, but it’s hard to take the narrative of a budding murderer as anything more than suspense played for shock value when his sudden presence in a doorway, accompanied by sliding chords, has all the nuance of a jump scare.

More saliently, the heavy-handedness slows down the story — or belies the fact that compared to “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” has much less story to tell. Where “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was a dense, fast-paced story unpacking several characters, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is fully Cunanan’s character drama, with meaningful but limited forays into the lives of his victims. And though this second installment is pursuing different goals, the difference between the two seasons is stark. Even their relationship to the truth is different: In the first, meticulous reporting still left the interpretation of the evidence to the audience, as the consumption of the murder trial became entertainment. In the second, the crime’s nature and perpetrator are known almost immediately, and though space is given to the investigation and the sensationalism around Versace’s death, it’s all secondary to the story’s interest in Cunanan’s development. Even the Versace family — including an impeccable Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace and a strong performance from singer Ricky Martin as Versace’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico — are sidelined to follow Cunanan’s journey. It’s difficult to swallow the bait-and-switch of the premise, if you’re not ready for it. Ramírez, Cruz and Martin are so compelling together that when the narrative veers steadily away from them — and their lush, high-fashion lives — it’s hard not to feel disappointed.

That being said, the inverted narrative presents a fascinating opportunity to examine Cunanan’s life as one that progresses into the closet, instead of emerging from it — and at its sharpest moments, the show is able to demonstrate how the spectrum of Criss, like other muses of creator Murphy, is coaxed to a career-defining performance in this role: Slippery, fabulating and mercurial, he’s a ’90s-era “Talented Mr. Ripley.” As we move backward through his life, we discover where his stories came from and how he built his worldview of resentment and entitlement. By the end of the season, our journey accelerates; we meet his broken mother, Mary Ann (Joanna Adler), and his unstable father, Modesto (Jon Jon Briones), which goes a long way toward explaining what Cunanan became. It’s worth noting that practically every performer in “American Crime Story” is stunning — whether that is Briones, Cruz, Judith Light (who plays Miglin’s widow, Marilyn) or Max Greenfield (who plays a Miami addict named Ronnie). Victims David Madson (Cody Fern) and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) have some of the most tragic material to work with, and both in very different ways express a deeply rooted ambivalence toward their own homosexuality.

In the show’s interpretation, Cunanan and Versace are each other’s doppelgängers; the eighth (and penultimate) episode, “Creator/Destroyer,” presents the show’s implications in the title. In the duality between the two characters, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” finds an externalization of the struggle of the gay identity: fabulous creation versus destructive shame. But the exploration of themes is hampered a bit by how little time Cunanan and Versace ever spend in the same space; one of their few scenes together in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” takes place during a heroin dream. And because of the need to relate information comprehensively, several scenes in this season are not, actually, in reverse chronological order — which is a little unmooring, if you’re not paying close attention, and unravels some of the significance of the structure.

On the whole, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is not quite one for the history books like the first season of “American Crime Story” — if only because, perplexingly, all of its Italian characters are played by Latinx actors. The second installment of this anthology series hopes to do for homophobia what the first season did for racism — a lofty goal that is left unrealized, in the eight episodes sent to critics. But with an array of fantastic performances and an eye to exploring the complexity of contemporary queerness, “American Crime Story” has produced another interesting history play to chew on — one with a lingering, intriguing aftertaste.

TV Review: ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ on FX