Tag: review

The Assassination of Gianni Versace review: Penelope Cruz’s new show is more stunning than she is

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
Cast – Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez, Ricky Martin, Penelope Cruz
Rating – 4/5

In 1990, the future Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Richard Linklater, directed Slacker, a film whose impact is still felt to this day, even if the actual number of people who’ve seen it remains as low as ever. It was his attempt to capture the free-flowing nature of campus life in his hometown, Austin – a small film made on a shoestring budget in which characters would meet other characters, and in that typical manner for which Linklater would later become known, talk about every topic under the bright Texan sun.

As an audience member, Linklater said that he had always wondered what happened to the supporting characters in movies – the shopkeepers and the cab drivers who’d briefly interrupt the protagonist’s larger story. Where did those people come from? What were their hopes and dreams? What did their lives amount to? It was with these questions in mind that Linklater made Slacker, a movie that has no protagonist, and abandons characters the moment new ones pop up, switching the direction in which the story – if there was a story at all – was headed and subverting everything you thought you knew about narrative storytelling.

You wouldn’t normally invoke an early ‘90s indie film about aimless kids while talking about The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the second season of the terribly entertaining American Crime Story true-crime anthology series – but as strange as it may sound, that’s the one movie that sprang to mind. And there are several reasons for this, reasons that go beyond the simple stylistic similarities Versace and Slacker share – the constant switching focus of the plot, the backwards narrative, the subversion of expectations.

The first season, which was an addictive retelling of a modern American folktale – the trial of OJ Simpson – was a gloriously flamboyant piece of entertainment, capable of moments of starling insight in between scenes shot with swooping cameras and punctuated by bombastic speeches. There was a deliberate tone to the way in which creator Ryan Murphy tackled the story. It was only natural to expect more of the same in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is based on a true-life incident arguably more scandalous than OJ’s trial.

It begins with the seemingly impromptu murder of the Gianni Versace outside his sprawling and characteristically tacky Miami mansion. We watch as the famed designer wakes up in a bedroom fit for a European aristocrat, as he dresses himself in immaculate clothing and ambles through the hallways of his home, like a lion surveying his kingdom. His hand grazes the ornate sculptures of naked men that he has stationed like guards outside a Roman chieftains’ quarters. He touches these trophies, both real and inanimate. Finally, his rests his hands on his partner, who stands silently by his side throughout the show’s nine episodes, like he owns him. He probably does.

After eating breakfast in his courtyard, tiled with the Versace logo, he ventures outside, into the real world, where the rest of us live – the people who idolise him and dream of wearing his clothes one day. And that is where he gets shot in the face by Andrew Cunanan. But The Assassination of Gianni Versace isn’t about the designer’s rise to fame and it isn’t about his secret life as a homosexual man. Nor is it about his rumoured battle with HIV and the faith he showed in his sister, Donatella, when he learnt that he didn’t have much time to live. It could easily have been about any one of these things and as fans of Season 1, we would’ve have hungrily accepted it, and probably enjoyed it, considering how undemanding we’ve become.

But then, if it were about these stories, which are admittedly intriguing, that would rob us of the opportunity of bringing up Slacker, wouldn’t it? Because it will only take Versace one episode to upend every expectation you might have – certainly every expectation I certainly had was discarded with the swiftness of last season’s fall/winter collection.

When Versace fell to his death in slow motion, outside the palace he’d built for himself, with Ricky Martin crying over his limp body, I fully expected to be transported to a flashback of the young Gianni, growing up in Italy with the driven yet under-confident Donatella. But that would have been too easy. Instead of profiling the fashion icon and peeling back the layers of secrecy with which he lived his life – quite like what Murphy and his team of excellent writers did in Season 1 – the show turns its focus on Cunanan, and traces his unsettling journey to the moment he pulled the trigger in front of Versace’s mansion.

And as a portrait of a serial killer, The Assassination of Gianni Versace couldn’t have been more captivating. Remember, it has only been months since we saw Mindhunter, David Fincher’s brilliant Netflix show about the birth of serial killers, but while they’re both essentially about the same thing – understanding, or at least trying to understand the psyche of a mass murderer – they couldn’t have been more distinct. Both shows are, however, the products of very singular visions – and God knows Ryan Murphy is, for the lack of a better word, brighter in his world view. This time, though, he is slightly overshadowed by Tom Rob Smith, who has written every episode of the season. There is a tonal uniformity that this process brings to television, and we’ve seen it work several times in the recent past, most notably in True Detective.

And as terrific as the storytelling choices are in this show – we revisit Cunanan’s murders in reverse, meeting his future victims after we’ve already seen them being bludgeoned or hacked or shot – it’s the three main performances that elevate it. Edgar Ramirez (who plays Gianni Versace) and Penelope Cruz (a suitably dusky, pre-surgery Donatella) might not be as central to the proceedings as one might have initially anticipated, but they’re the pool of subtlety that is essential to the tornado that Murphy’s programmes sometimes have the tendency of becoming.

But this is Darren Criss’ show. As Andrew Cunanan, he is a petulant child in certain scenes – when he is demanding rich white men to become his sugar daddies and lashing out at his single mother, scarred by the man who broke them – and in others, he is a terrifying monster – incapable of decency, surviving only to destroy others. With this show, he has become a star.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has more in common with the films of David Fincher than it has with its own predecessor, but isn’t it refreshing when a programme doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but comes up with not one, but several new versions?

The Assassination of Gianni Versace review: Penelope Cruz’s new show is more stunning than she is

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Episode 9 Review: Alone

★★★★☆

The finale of The Assassination of Gianni Versace is an excellent showcase for a few of the series’ best qualities: attention to detail, an ability to fill in the gaps in the record, and a surprisingly effective effort to make us see some shared humanity with Andrew Cunanan, or at least the ways in which the world failed him as well as his victims.

This episode largely succeeds in its Herculean task of resolving the Andrew of the first half of the installment – the spree killer, the vicious manipulator – with the Andrew of the second – the insecure pretender who grew up in a home of violence and deceiving your way to the top.

There are, of course, more clear messages about the way America treated gay men at the time. Some news segments blame David Madsen in a way that feels tied up in his sexuality and past relationship with Andrew. In one poster, Andrew’s photo is doctored with lipstick and again with a wig and lipstick, even though he wasn’t known to cross-dress.

There’s an excellent blending of archival footage, like of Princess Diana and Elton John at Gianni’s funeral, with news clips done over with our actors, like his old friend Elizabeth going on the news to tell Andrew she knows the real him and loves him, and won’t he please end it peacefully.

There are spotlights for three of our more minor characters, as Jon Jon Briones returns as Modesto Cunanan, trying to parlay his son’s infamy into something for himself, Judith Light stuns yet again as Marilyn Miglin, desperately hoping for an end to her tragedy, and Max Greenfield gives an award-worthy performance as sad Ronnie that will do the impossible, and make us all forget about Schmidt.

Andrew may be a murderer, but his father is an abuser, a manipulator, the violent wheeler-and dealer who taught him everything he knows about deception. He also taught him cruelty, which we remember as Modesto answers a question about his son’s crime and calls him innocent…of being a homosexual. One of the more heartbreaking moments is seeing Andrew cry to his father on the phone: “I’m in trouble, I need help, come get me.” Who hasn’t said those words to a parent?

It’s followed, of course, by Andrew’s face when he hears his father on tv and realizes that no, he is not coming to save him. He’s just trying to make a buck and inflate his sense of self, as usual.

Another moment that worked surprisingly well was Andrew seeing himself in Marilyn Miglin’s story, as she’s shown on the many televisions in the houseboat. Andrew is surrounded by the news, going back and forth between relishing it and being so upset that he shoots a TV. His time in the houseboat is, generally, claustrophobic and increasingly desperate, as he eats the dog food that he had earlier spit out into his own wanted poster. He looks more and more like Ronnie, who’s both AIDS sick and dope sick, as he gets closer to his death.

Later, Marilyn is proud of Lee’s secret acts of kindness, but there’s a hint of the idea that if he didn’t tell her about that, what else didn’t he tell her? Again, this is all courtesy of the powerhouse performance by Judith Light, which gives life and import to the smallest detail, letting it take on new meaning, like the fact that Lee helped a young man’s career.

And still, we have precious little of Versace. In some ways, it feels as though he would have had better coverage if he hadn’t been quite so famous, if he had been memorialized in a single dedicated episode, like Lee Miglin, or even if he had been in a couple, but in more concentrated doses, like David Madson and Jeff Trail.

While Penelope Cruz has given a great performance as Donatella, ultimately it doesn’t feel like it adds up to all that much. Perhaps her character’s arc is a victim of the rearrangement of the Versace chronology to demonstrate maximum parallels between Gianni and Andrew, in service to Andrew’s story line.

I can’t finish this without calling out Antonio’s final scene, where he attempts suicide. A person could reasonably finish this show and believe Antonio died, which is the not the case. There’s so much more to Antonio’s story, why not hint at that, rather than suggest death? We was sidelined and deprived of the rights an opposite gender spouse would have without question, but he also overcame that and his grief and went on to continue his career.

When Marilyn Miglin says, “good. It’s over.” I can’t help but think of the real-life Marilyn, who, somewhere out there, must live with not only what Andrew did to her husband, but with what the media, the public, and even this very tv show is doing to her. It’s never over for Marilyn and the other loved ones, and we have all taken part in ensuring that.

Taking stock of it now, I’m not all that convinced that Assassination was for the greater good. Unlike The People vs OJ, it didn’t bring about any new revelations by reframing an old crime with new understanding. Nor did it particularly empower the victims or their loved ones, like The Keepers. If we have to put something up on the scale to weight against the pain of the real life Marilyn Miglin, Jeff Trail’s father, Mary Ann Cunanan and so many others, what is there? Some fantastic performances, perhaps career making for Darren Criss and Max Greenfield. Perhaps more attention on longtime actor Jon Jon Briones. A reminder to the American public that our dark past isn’t as far back as we think.

But is it enough?

Lined up against the real anguish of those who lost their loved ones, many of whom are ardently opposed to this show existing? We’ve only given Andrew more of what he wanted: we made him special.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Episode 9 Review: Alone

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Season Finale Recap: The Bloody End

★★★☆☆

One of the things I remember most vividly about the hunt for Andrew Cunanan was watching his final showdown on television. The regular broadcast was interrupted as the police went into a houseboat and found his dead body, and I just remember someone on TV saying “houseboat,” “houseboat,” “houseboat” repeatedly. That is the one detail about this story that always stuck out to me.

I’ve always wanted to live on a houseboat, ever since MacGuyver had one. But being from the landlocked part of Connecticut, it was never a reality. That’s probably why I imagined the houseboat where Andrew killed himself as being more like a sailboat, like the one where he hid before he got caught by that sunburned lady looking for her friend Antonio. It seemed cramped and gross in my mind. Of course, that wasn’t the reality at all: He was in some old queen’s fantasy world of a house boat and it was like the ‘70s come to life, complete with wicker furniture and a nearly campy interior. It had a giant television projector – cutting-edge technology at the time – and, if American Crime Story is to be believed, a closetful of nice clothes that miraculously fit Andrew. This all made me totally rewrite the narrative of how I had imagined Andrew’s final hours.

Still, this finale limps toward the finish line. Maybe that’s because I was one of the viewers who watched the police close in on Andrew back in 1997, so I already knew how this story ends. But looking back, I feel like the most interesting parts of this series were frontloaded into the first few episodes. Even those of us who followed the story knew little about Cunanan’s earlier crimes or his motivations, so shining light on those aspects of his life was an interesting choice – not just because of this story, but because of the time in general.

Now that we’re focused on Andrew’s final head-shaving, dog-food-eating days in a houseboat, there isn’t much more exposing left to do, save for a few heartbreaking moments with his parents. I’ll never forget that image of his mother Mary Ann, smoking a cigarette with a blanket over her head and illuminated only by the television. What happens with his father Modesto is also heartbreaking: When Andrew reaches out to him, he tells Andrew that he’ll come back to the U.S., even though there are charges against him, and he will take him back to the Philippines and get him to freedom and safety. Andrew waits by the door with his clothes packed and calmly reading. (How do you select a book when you’re on the run and it might be the last one you ever read?) Modesto never shows up, but Andrew does see him on television talking about how he’s selling the rights to his son’s story and exploiting their phone call for his own gain. For the final time, his father has failed him.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the finale is Andrew watching Marilyn Miglin hawking her perfume on television. “I imagine going back in time and telling [my mother], Here is something I made for you, the kind of perfume my father would give you for your birthday as a way of saying how special you are,” she says, as if speaking directly to him. Here she is, creating the same kind of narrative of rewriting reality, of rewiring the past to make the future electric, that Andrew mastered. She is using it to make the fortune that Andrew craved, while all he could do with his gifts was destroy. We would hope to see some empathy in Andrew for what he did to Marilyn’s husband, but we never see that. Instead, we see something close to awe.

I’m not sure if Andrew actually watched all of that coverage of the manhunt, but it sure makes sense that he would in this show, given what we know about his character. It also makes sense that he would go from laughing about it (as the cork on his champagne pops) to absolutely loathing it (as the media coverage paints him to be something that he didn’t think he was).

What’s odd is that, no matter how much of a monster Andrew was, the coverage and the hunt were so much worse than we could imagine. After all, hasn’t that been the point of this show all along? The worst offender is the wanted poster with Andrew’s face, which also shows mockups of what he might look like dressed as a woman. (Not that it matters, but it looks like VHS cover art for a bad made-for-television movie starring Marilu Henner as a police officer searching for a serial killer in a drag bar.) Even though he never had a penchant for drag, the FBI just automatically assumed that a gay man would either disguise himself as a woman or actually want to live life as a woman. This idea that the police’s homophobia made them ineffective at catching Cunanan was lightly considered in the opening episode and I hoped it would be picked up more subsequently, but it seems to have lost steam just as the series did. Save for this one moment, it’s a shame it wasn’t a bigger focus.

The Versace side of the drama is a little lackluster, too. I felt especially bad for Gianni’s boyfriend Antonio, who was shut out by the family, ignored by the priest at the funeral, and generally mistreated by everyone because he couldn’t (or didn’t) legally marry. But what happens between him and Donatella — her shutting him out of the homes and his promised allowance — seems less about him being gay and more about Donatella not liking him, so it’s a different narrative that doesn’t necessarily explore the homophobia of the time.

Meanwhile, it feels like “Alone” brings all of the guest stars out of hiding so they can each get one little turn onscreen again. We not only see Marilyn, Antonio, and Donatella, but also Andrew’s junkie friend Ronnie and all of the prominent detectives from the case. (You know, the detectives who seemed like they’d have a more active role after the first episode.) After Andrew kills himself, we’re left to wade through all of the drama with the rest of the players. The worst of it, without a doubt, is Antonio trying to kill himself out of grief. Although the real Antonio did admit to depression following Versace’s death, he is still alive and well. Leaving the audience with him collapsing in a maid’s arms seems deceptive at best and a bald-faced lie at worst.

The scene that really wrapped up the whole drama – for me, at least – was Andrew remembering his meeting with Versace. We find out that they never had sex, and that Gianni was the one man who didn’t fall into Andrew’s advances because he knew it would cheapen his dreams and ambitions. When Andrew tells Versace all about his desire to be special and how he’ll convince the world of it, his reply is, “It’s not about persuading people you’re going to do something great. It’s about doing it.” That one line separates what makes these two men different.

Whether or not we like it, though, they are inextricably linked because Andrew will forever be piggybacking off of Versace’s greatness. In the final images of the season, Donatella mourns over Gianni in his own mausoleum while we see Andrew’s tiny placard amongst a million similar ones in a public resting place with no one there to remember him. The show’s closing statement seems to be that Versace is ultimately greater, a true individual who was loved and whose accomplishments will withstand the test of time, while Andrew is just some nobody who tried to find greatness with destruction. However, this message seems at odds not only with reality, but with the case that the show itself made by trying to find the humanity in Andrew.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Season Finale Recap: The Bloody End

In American Crime Story’s Searing Finale, There’s a Creator and a Destroyer in Everyone

Even when someone’s death is not unexpected, untimely, and violent, there’s often a profound ripple effect through family and community. When the person is murdered, it’s a whole other level of crazy.

The final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story begins where the first episode did, with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) shooting Versace (Edgar Ramirez) in the face at point blank range. The first time, we saw the reactions of the people around Versace. This time, we follow Andrew as he breaks into an empty houseboat and raids the fridge. Finding a bottle of champagne, he smiles as he tears the foil from the cork and turns on the TV to watch news coverage of the murder. (Of course, there’s speculation that it’s the mafia, and veiled suggestions that the “infamous” designer might have been targeted for reasons they aren’t quite able to talk about.) As an eyewitness describes seeing Versace on the ground, the cork explodes out of the champagne bottle like a gunshot and Andrew startles violently, then collapses on the couch, giggling. A correspondent notes that Andrew Cunanan is the suspected killer. “Oh my God,” he breathes. You think he’s panicking at first, but as he walks up the stairs to sit on the upper deck of the houseboat, holding the champagne bottle by the neck, watching the police helicopters scanning the waterfront, you realize it’s not panic but elation. He’s done it. He’s famous.

We cut to Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) as FBI agents come to let her know that Andrew Cunanan has killed Gianni Versace. “When will it end?” she asks in a brittle voice. “You had two months. You had his name. His picture. He had the money he stole from Lee. What have you been doing?”

“We’ve been looking for him.” But the agent can’t wholly defend himself, and they all know what she’s really saying. Lee Miglin’s murder wasn’t particularly compelling to them until Andrew killed a celebrity. Until then, it had been dismissed as a Gay Thing. A trivium. The FBI suggest she get on a flight out of Florida, that Cunanan might know she’s filming there.

Her voice could etch glass. “You want me to run. From him? You provide whatever security you think necessary. I have never missed a broadcast in my life.”

Andrew learns from the TV that he’s made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. He’s described as a male prostitute who served affluent clients. (It’s left open to speculation whether he knew Versace in that capacity.) He catches a statement from Marilyn Miglin in which she simply says her husband of 38 years was “her prince” and that she had “a fairytale marriage.” You can’t help hearing both connotations of the word “fairy,” and remembering Cunanan’s siblings referring to him as “Prince Andrew”; everything’s starting to converge and in Marilyn’s slow, deep, pause-riddled voice here is almost oracular.

Andrew dresses, leaves the houseboat and steals a car, giggling at the radio coverage suggesting Mafia involvement in Versace’s murder. Then he realizes he’s stuck at a police checkpoint and it stops being quite so funny. There’s no way off the island. All the causeways are blocked. The world’s finally paying attention to Andrew. He throws the stolen car keys into the water and screams.

He’s not the only one who’s watching the coverage. His mother is hiding under a blanket in front of the TV when the knock comes at the door in San Diego. She opens the door for the police and meekly asks “Have you killed my son?”

No, they have not. Andrew, now trapped like a rat with no money, isn’t laughing any more. Back in the houseboat, he watches TV footage of his mother being dragged out of her condo by the feds, looking totally unraveled.

Meanwhile, the cops have relocated poor, uneducated junkie Ronnie, a character I wasn’t expecting to see again and from whom I definitely wasn’t expecting one of the most searing monologues of the series. “He wasn’t hiding,” Ronnie tells the female cop. “Oh, you were looking for him, weren’t you? The only [lesbian] on the force? But the other cops, they weren’t looking so hard, were they?” It’s a tough call whether the look on her face or Ronnie’s is more devastating. Ronnie’s dismissiveness of their attitude—sure, Cunanan kills a bunch of gay nobodies and nobody cares, but now he kills a celebrity and he matters?—is so scathing and so hideously real, and when the cop doubles down and accuses him of being an accessory to murder, he just scoffs.

“So you never talked about Versace?” the male cop asks Ronnie.

“All he talked about was Versace,” Ronnie replies, his slightly clouded-over eyes suddenly clear as he leans in. “We all did. We all wondered what it would be like to be so powerful it didn’t matter that you were gay. The truth is, you were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting… Andrew isn’t hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”

It’s such a nasty and amazing moment. Because everyone in that room knows this guy is telling it exactly like it is. And there are no available rejoinders, just none. Again, the narcissistic quandary: When you’re not being looked at, you stop existing, so how far will you go to ensure you stay alive? And when society has a tendency to erase you because, as Ronnie puts it, you were “born a lie,” how much more toxic is it to have been raised by parents who, whether deliberately or by incompetence, saw to it that you never had a sense of your inherent human value? Lots of people deal with societal intolerance without becoming anything but stronger for it. Lots of people have narcissistic tendencies without being disordered. Lots of people have personality disorders and never kill anyone. But Andrew Cunanan was a perfect storm, and this man who barely knew him understands it almost instinctively.

Andrew haunts the waterfront, literally and figuratively adrift, and is getting really hungry. In front of a TV screen again, he sees Lizzie (Annaleigh Ashford) reading a statement in which she says she knows who he really is, adds that she loves him unconditionally, and urges him to turn himself in.

Next, David Madson’s father appears on TV, responding to accusations that David was involved with Andrew in the murder of Jeff Trail. (The cops really haven’t bothered connecting the dots, have they?) Andrew turns off the TV, but the voices don’t stop—it’s almost as if they’re in his head, but really there are just multiple TVs and radios blaring the same coverage. The desperation is getting serious at this point. He’s hungry enough to try (unsuccessfully) to eat dog food. So he watches Marilyn Miglin on the Home Shopping Network, talking about how she always wanted to make a perfume for her mother; how her wonderful father had died young; how they had lived in poverty and her mother had never had money for luxuries; and how this perfume she’s selling is one she would have wanted to go back in time to give to her mother as a way of saying “how special” she was.

Special.

And yep, Andrew calls Dad (Jon Jon Briones), who immediately says he’ll be there for Andrew in 24 hours, regardless of the danger he’ll be putting himself in. “I will find you. I will hold you in my arms like I used to. I promise.” Andrew is stupid enough to be filled with hope, and packs his things and waits.

But Modesto Cunanan doesn’t show up in Miami. He shows up on TV, from Manila, telling a reporter his son is innocent.

Of being a homosexual.

Modesto goes on to say Andrew is “special” and “a genius” and that he would never kill anyone and that he’s too smart for the police to find him anyway. That he phones all the time. That he has spoken to Andrew in the last 24 hours.

“What did you discuss?” the reporter asks.

Modesto smiles like a snake. “The movie rights to his life story. Andrew was very particular about the title.” The camera zooms in on Modesto’s face. “A Name to Be Remembered By.” Horror dawns on Andrew’s face, followed by rage. He puts a bullet through the TV screen, and through his father’s face.

In Milan, Antonio (Ricky Martin) and Donatella (Penelope Cruz) are talking before the funeral. Antonio mentions staying at Lake Como in a house Gianni had left to him. Donatella tells Antonio the board had to take possession of all Gianni’s properties because his personal finances were troubled. There’s nothing she can do. She’s on the board and Gianni’s sister, but there’s nothing she can do. Antonio’s out in the cold. Nice lady. At the memorial service, the priest won’t mention Antonio or even touch him as he walks by to bless the family. It turns out that Ronnie never understood that maybe there was really no amount of wealth or privilege that could erase the stigma of being gay. Well, maybe in Miami Beach, but not in the Catholic Church, not even when your priest is supposed to be there to help you process the loss of your partner of 15 years.

Andrew’s now eating the dog food as he watches Princess Diana and Elton John arrive in Milan for the funeral. He watches the service, fervently singing along with the boys’ choir rendition of “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” I don’t think he’s singing for Gianni Versace.

They’ve found the houseboat. The landlord, the cops, the FBI, helicopters, snipers. Andrew locks himself into a bedroom, where he sees a phantasm of his younger self. As the cops enter the houseboat, Andrew poses (dramatically as ever) in a seriously freighted silhouette, with the barrel of Jeff Trail’s gun in his mouth.

“I’m so happy right now,” he says to Gianni Versace as we hear the shot. They’re back in the San Francisco opera house from the season premiere. Gianni tells Andrew he doesn’t need to persuade people that he’s great or special, he needs to do something special. “Finish your novel,” he tells Andrew. Andrew begs to be taken on as his protégé, then tries to kiss Versace, who rebuffs him. “No,” Versace says. “I wanted you to be here to be inspired, to be nourished by this,” he says, indicating the empty house. “If we kissed, you would doubt. One day you will understand why I said no.”

Of course, Versace’s right, and we’d all live in a better world if there were more men with boundaries that intact.

We cut back to Marilyn Miglin as the police come to tell her that Cunanan’s dead. “Good. It’s over.” Her assistant finds her looking through letters. “We receive hundreds of letters from viewers,” she says. “Since my husband died, I receive letters about him. People he helped. Whose bills he paid. He never told me.”

At Lake Como, Donatella tells Santo that she was annoyed with Gianni the morning he was killed, that she didn’t pick up the phone when he called.

Antonio takes a boatload of sleeping pills.

A plaque with Andrew Cunanan’s name on it is applied to a blank piece of marble in a columbarium. A maid finds Antonio still alive. Donatella lights a candle for Gianni. The camera recedes down the faceless hallway of the columbarium, the ashes put away behind the identical squares of white stone.

In everyone, there is a creator and a destroyer.

In American Crime Story’s Searing Finale, There’s a Creator and a Destroyer in Everyone

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Ends With Cunanan ’Alone’

A few thoughts on the conclusion of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story coming up just as soon as the champagne cork pops…

Versace was a huge tonal and structural departure from the OJ season of American Crime Story. I admire Ryan Murphy’s willingness to gamble on Tom Rob Smith’s very different vision — half the fun of the anthology miniseries structure is the ability to radically change the show each time out — and appreciated the performances by Criss, Ramirez, Cruz, Martin, Light, and everyone else, but the experiment never quite came together for me.

Some of this was simply being forced to spend so much time in the company of Cunanan, when the show’s unflinching portrayal of his parastic sociopathy would be much more sustainable at movie length. And some was from Smith’s conceit of telling the story in reverse, so we only got proper context for things (the murder of Jeff Trail, that Cunanan’s story about having the master bedroom as a kid was true) well after the fact, which sucked a lot of the emotional power from the thing.

A show that went fully in reverse would have ended with last week’s “Creator/Destroyer,” the first episode to attempt to explain, and even slightly sympathize with, Cunanan as we saw how his father’s own pathological lies helped shape Andrew into the monster he became. It probably would have been a more potent end to the story than “Alone” turned out to be.

Some of this is Smith being bound by history. After murdering Versace, Cunanan eluded authorities for a week, then killed himself on that houseboat without a suicide note. So there’s no dramatic confrontation, no grand pronouncement about motive. Instead, the script lets the allegedly most important moment of Cunanan’s life flash before his eyes as the bullet enters, taking us back to his evening with Versace from the premiere, and to Gianni casually repudiating Andrew’s life philosophy by telling him to do something with his life rather than assuming greatness will simply come to him. It’s an effective scene — virtually every scene with Gianni was, which only left me wishing the show was more about him and Antonio and Donatella, and less about Cunanan — but doesn’t offer a huge amount of insight into Cunanan beyond what the previous eight episodes had told us.

This held true throughout the finale. Judith Light, Ricky Martin, and Penelope Cruz were all excellent again as Marilyn Miglin, Antonio, and Donatella each grappled with their losses. But other than perhaps Antonio reckoning with the limitations of his inheritance (due in part to not being Gianni’s legal spouse), their scenes were well-acted but thematically redundant.

The finale’s most effective reprise was the return of Max Greenfield as Ronnie, who was also there to reiterate ideas the season had put forth several times before, but in a manner so bluntly eloquent that it served his purpose. In particular, Ronnie telling the cops that they were “disgusted by him long before he became disgusting” neatly and viciously summed up the series’ attitude about why Cunanan was able to take and ruin so many lives before anyone in law-enforcement took him seriously.

Through those first eight episodes FX initially sent to critics, Versace felt like a collection of terrific pieces that added up to less than the sum of their individual parts. I had hoped the finale would retroactively elevate what had come before. Instead, it seemed a missed opportunity, like a lot of the season, down to the renewed emphasis on the Versaces after many weeks of focusing on Cunanan and, at times, his other victims.

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Ends With Cunanan ’Alone’

American Crime Story ends an uneven season with one final death

“Alone” B-

If nothing else, the finale for The Assassination Of Gianni Versace was always going to be interesting. The series started with ambitious goals to provide a true crime series, a character portrait of a killer, a time capsule of the ‘90s, and an overlapping examination of a number of issues ranging from classism to internalized homophobia to the AIDS crisis. Not all of it was successful (in fact, most were not) and it resulted in a fairly uneven season of television where, from episode to episode, it would somehow switch from too packed with information to too shallow. Inability to drum to a steady beat was Assassination’s biggest frustration: the first couple of episodes were almost maniacally paced and brimming with plot; the last few made me wonder why we needed a nine-episode order to tell a possible six-episode story. But seeing how all of this—and the constantly-jumping timeline—would come together, and wondering what’s left in the tank, was part of the intrigue for the back half. After all, all Assassination has left is Andrew’s final kill: himself.

“Alone,” almost bookending the premiere episode, returns to July 1997 and again shows us Versace’s murder. But then it shows us the days between the murder and Andrew’s death, speculating on what Andrew was doing, saying, and feeling. Of course, there’s no way for writer Tom Rob Smith (and journalist Maureen Orth) to know the truth. What the episode guesses is that Andrew was celebratory, poppin’ champagne and obsessing over the news coverage, watching the failed manhunt on the deck while looking oddly at peace. He squats on a houseboat (this much is true) and seems thrilled by his face plastered on the screen—until it becomes too much. He watches Lizzie read a letter begging him to give himself up, even bringing up Andrew’s godchildren (this tape is real; we have no way of knowing whether or not Andrew ever saw it), and an interview with David Madson’s father, wondering if the two were lovers.

Then Andrew breaks down and calls his father in the Philippines, sobbing on the phone. Modesto is Modesto to the end, basically scolding Andrew because “men don’t cry” but he says he’s going to come to Miami to help. Of course, Modesto isn’t to be trusted. Andrew later watches an interview where Modesto denies Andrew’s homosexuality and, we learn, just wants to make a movie about him. (Here’s a fun fact check: Modesto did indeed want a movie with the non-negotiable title A Name To Be Remembered. He thought John F. Kennedy Jr. could play Andrew, and that it would gross $115 million.) Andrew and Modesto never reunite; shortly after, the houseboat is surrounded and Andrew puts a gun in his own mouth.

Maybe that’s part of why “Alone” feels so incomplete (and why I’m hesitant to put the blame entirely on the writing for my lukewarm feelings), because it doesn’t have anywhere to go except back to that fantasy sequence, of Andrew and Versace, all talk of inspiration and lust but not much else. I’ve mostly avoided (I think!) comparing the two seasons but, sorry: American Crime Story had an easier time with The People v. O.J. Simpson in part because it’s an easier story—easier to tell, easier to digest, easier to format into a season-long narrative arc based around a trial. It had an ending where Simpson went free (spoiler alert!) and had a life (and eventually a prison stint) afterward, which writers could use to go back and inform the character(s) and actions (I would be surprised if they didn’t dip into If I Did It as well for some insight). But here, Andrew gave himself a final ending, meaning we’ll never get his side of things, or his reasoning, or closure outside of knowing he can’t kill again. It was an abrupt ending to the “largest failed manhunt in U.S. history,” and that in itself felt incomplete, which is mirrored in the finale.

But “Alone” isn’t just following Andrew, which means we see a struggling Donatella and Antonio mourning Versace, even while still at odds (they have continued to have a vaguely-contemptuous relationship long afterward). There’s another wonderful appearance from Judith Light who, as Mrs. Miglin, takes the police to task for having Andrew’s name and photo for months without catching him. “What has he been doing for two months? What have you been doing?” (And that perfume bit was an easy highlight, too.) The police also go to Mary Anne Cunanan who can only ask, “Did you kill my son?”

They interrogate Ronnie (oh, hey, Ronnie!) who basically shrugs his way through the police interview—but does confirm Detective Lori’s instincts that they should’ve been looking at particular gay bars, so we can get some bonus anger at the botched investigation. “Alone” reiterates one of Assassination’s most prevalent points: that Andrew, and other gay people, “all imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay” and “the truth is you were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting.” It should feel more powerful than it is but instead it’s a reminder of the show’s insistence on beating us over the head with the same points when it could instead cover new ground.

One thing that stuck with me in Orth’s book was the press/celebrity around the matter: Modesto’s Larry King interview, Mary Anne’s general presence on the press circuit, the way that various friends and former lovers of Andrew were paraded around to give their stories, the disgusting hunger of the press who found themselves in bidding wars for sensationalized pictures or interviews, the people who basically had lucrative mini-careers profiting on the many deaths. For much of Assassination, I’d assumed (or hoped) this would get touched on (especially thinking back to the pilot, with the woman’s magazine and Versace’s blood, or the Polaroid photo of his body) but we didn’t get that which certainly seems like a missed opportunity—particularly because the show was heavy on classism, and a general obsession with money and fame.

The ending of the series is a mixed bag: Mrs. Miglin finds out Lee was a nice guy who paid bills and helped a man’s career (is the show implying that these were also his lovers? I don’t know! I kind of don’t care!); Donatella is wracked with guilt because she was annoyed with her brother and didn’t answer his call, the last call he’d make to her before he died; Antonio is all alone without Versace and swallows a handful of pills in a suicide attempt; the series ends on a sweeping shot of a mausoleum where Andrew’s body is kept. And … that’s it. Which is how I felt after that: “Is this it?” But at the same time, I’m not sure what else there could be.

Stray observations

  • Like always, I’m worried that this review makes it seem like I like it way less than I did, but it’s just easier to focus on the parts that left me cold or wanting. Overall, it was a solid season of television with a few bumps in the road, and the ambitiousness of it all helped to sell it. It’s just not a show that I will ever rewatch; I’d be surprised if I’m still thinking about it next week whereas the first season routinely enters my mind. But please, change my mind!
  • Was that end disclaimer in all the aired episodes (I’ve been watching screeners) or just this one?
  • The acting remained superb throughout and I would love it if Judith Light popped up in some future installments— though I must admit I don’t have high hopes for the Katrina season, and wish ACS would just skip ahead to Monica Lewinsky.
  • Speaking of: What’s your dream American Crime Story season? In my opinion, Ryan Murphy’s most missed opportunity was not acquiring Jeffrey Toobin’s Patty Hearst book because that story is basically built for this.

American Crime Story ends an uneven season with one final death

American Crime Story: Versace Finale: Did the FX Drama Go Out With a Bang?

Wednesday’s finale of American Crime Story: Versace brought to an end the horrific escapades of Andrew Cunanan and checked back in with the people whose lives were forever changed by his twisted actions.

The episode picked up exactly where the season premiere began, with a sunkissed Andrew strolling down the streets of Miami Beach, gun in hand, waiting for the perfect shot at Gianni Versace. And we all know how that went.

Judith Light’s Marilyn Miglin was the first familiar face to reappear; the FBI showed up at her Miami hotel room to inform her that it was no longer safe for her to be in Florida, offering to help transport her to safety. She declined, demanding that they escort her to her scheduled home-shopping broadcast, but not before dressing down the bumbling agents who failed to capture Andrew:

How many more are going to die? How much more pain do you think I can suffer? Two months. You had two months. You had his name, his photo. What did he have, the money he stole from Lee? What has he been doing for two months? What have YOU been doing? And where is he now, that man? I won’t say his name. Where is he now? … You want me to run? You want me to hide from him? You provide whatever security you think necessary. I have never missed a broadcast in my life.

But Marilyn wasn’t the only shadow from Andrew’s past to take aim at the authorities. Max Greenfield’s Ronnie was also interrogated, providing him the platform to question how seriously they’d been taking this case.

“Oh, you were looking for him, weren’t you, the only lez on the force,” he said. “But the other cops, they weren’t searching so hard, where they? Why is that, because he killed a bunch of nobody gays?”

Meanwhile, Andrew was holed up in some stranger’s houseboat literally eating dog food, practically daring the feds to bust him. (Apparently Ronnie was right when he said, “Andrew is not hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”) He spent most of his time watching reports about himself on the news, including uplifting messages from his friends (Lizzie!) and exploitative interviews with his father — the latter of which made Andrew so angry that he shot his television screen. (Well, the television screen of the man who owned he house in which he was squatting.)

Speaking of the homeowner, it was his return that triggered the beginning of the end for Andrew. Shortly after he reported a burglary, police helicopters were circling overhead and a hostage negotiator was attempting to talk Andrew out of the house. But Andrew wasn’t about to give in — not on someone else’s terms, at least. He placed a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger before he could be apprehended.

Wednesday’s finale also took us inside Gianni’s funeral, during which Antonio discovered that he might as well have died along with his lover. Not only did the priest shun his greeting, but Donatella informed him that he wouldn’t be able to live on the property Gianni had promised him. As a member of the board that controlled the property, Donatella could have insisted that he live there — that is, if she had cared enough to do so.

American Crime Story: Versace Finale: Did the FX Drama Go Out With a Bang?


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“Alone” with Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson

Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson discuss “Alone,” the final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story and how the show chose to portray the final days of Andrew Cunanan. More from star Darren Criss and Executive Producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson are the featured interview.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Season Finale: A Perfect Boy

Season 2, Episode 9: ‘Alone’

It turns out that “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” this gorgeous mess of a television series, was neither about an assassination nor, really, about Versace, the fashion designer who was shot to death on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion in 1997.

It would have been more accurately called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Andrew Cunanan,” Versace’s killer, whose spectacular orgy of violence briefly dominated headlines around the world at the close of the American century.

Over the eight previous episodes, starting with Versace’s killing, the series drew us back in time, through Cunanan’s killings of four other people; his career as a drug addict and escort; his resentment of the fame and accomplishment of other gay men; his odd childhood; his troubled relationship with his doting but oppressive and mendacious father; and — in the closest thing to a “Rosebud” moment — an imagined encounter between Cunanan and Versace years before the murders.

The finale is a riveting hour of television, filled with anguish and revelation as Cunanan, played by Darren Criss, relives his crime spree through television and radio reports that fill the Miami Beach houseboat where he is hiding out — appropriately blown-up to larger-than-life proportions on a home theater projector, no less. But, like much of what preceded it, the episode is a muddle, never quite settling on a coherent thesis or a sustained argument.

That’s a pity, because the series writer — the novelist Tom Rob Smith, who also wrote the chilling British mini-series “London Spy” — has consistently given the characters flashes of brilliance and insight.

No moment manifests those qualities more than the brilliant monologue by Ronnie, a gay man whom Cunanan befriended as he was hiding out from the law during the two months before he killed Versace. Ronnie recognizes Versace’s significance. “We all imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay,” he says during a police interrogation.

But he is also angered about society’s homophobia. The authorities had been slow to alert the gay community and to solicit its help in the manhunt — until, as Ronnie notes, one of the victims was famous. “You’re so used to us lurking in the shadows and, you know, most of us, we oblige,” he says. “People like me, we just drift away. We get sick? Nobody cares.”

“But Andrew was vain,” he continues, as a flicker of something almost like pride, or at least defiance, lights his eyes. “He wanted you to know about his pain, he wanted you to hear, he wanted you to know about being born a lie. Andrew is not hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”

Maybe. But at that moment Cunanan is, in fact, hiding out on a house boat. If he had a message to communicate about his pain, he did not share it.

The series is loosely based on Maureen Orth’s gossipy book “Vulgar Favours,” but the dramatizations and embellishments are so extreme that the series appears more a flight of wishful fantasy than an act of journalistic reconstruction. Also extreme is the director Daniel Minahan’s insistence on making this finale a retrospective of horrors. Until now, the series was told in reverse chronological order. But the finale circles back to where it started, and it is bursting at the seams with tangential characters, visual cues and over-the-top emotions that leave a jumble of impressions instead of delivering a clear punch.

We pay a visit to Marilyn Miglin, a self-made cosmetics magnate who sells her wares on television and whose husband, Lee, a Chicago property developer, was the third of Cunanan’s five victims. She happens to be in Tampa, Fla., while the manhunt following Versace’s murder occurs. The local police urge her to return to Chicago for fear that Cunanan may be after her, but she refuses.

Her strength and resolve are admirable — and Judith Light turns in a magnificent performance — but we hardly learn anything that we didn’t know from Episode 3.

Similarly repetitive is a scene in which the father of David Madson, the Minneapolis architect whom Cunanan forced to flee home before he killed him, communicates his anguish on a TV interview. We knew from Episode 4 that the father and son were both pretty decent people.

The most strange and haunting moment of this finale comes when Cunanan, desperate and reduced to eating dog food, dials his father, Modesto, a disgraced former stockbroker who fled to his native Philippines after some shady financial deals. Andrew is sobbing, a man of 27 reduced to helplessness. “Dad, I’m in trouble,” he pleas. “I need help. I need you to come get me.” Modesto promises Andrew that he’ll drop everything and race to Miami to rescue him. “I will find you and I will hug you and I will hold you in my arms,” he says.

Of course he doesn’t. He’s a hustler.

The next morning, it’s clear to Andrew that Modesto isn’t coming. In fact, he hasn’t even tried to leave the Philippines. “My son is not and has never been a homosexual,” he tells television reporters. He adds: “He was a perfect boy, the most special child I ever saw. The idea that he could be a killer makes me angry.”

Modesto tells the reporters that Andrew called him a night ago. Asked what they discussed, he replies: “The movie rights to his life story. I’m acting as the broker calling Hollywood from here in Manila. Andrew was very particular about the title.”

The movie, he says, will be called “A Name to Be Remembered.”

It’s disturbing and nauseating, of course. But we already knew from Episode 8 that Modesto was a pretty despicable guy.

Then there’s a jarring shift to Milan, where Versace is honored with a ceremony akin to a state funeral. We are reminded — as we learned in Episode 2 — that his sister and de facto heir, Donatella, and his partner, Antonio D’Amico, have a frosty relationship. Antonio wants to move to one of Gianni’s properties, on Lake Como; Donatella says it’s up to the company’s board to decide. (Later, we are shown, Antonio is driven to such despair that he attempts suicide.)

Watching the live broadcast of the funeral, Cunanan kneels before the television and makes a sign of the cross: a shockingly sacrilegious moment, but hardly of great emotional power since Cunanan’s Catholicism hasn’t really been a theme at all. A scene with Cunanan’s friend Lizzie, whom we have barely heard from, is similarly lacking, as she begs him on television to turn himself in. Lizzie — a straight, older friend who asked Andrew to be the godfather to her children — has intrigued me throughout the series, but the underinvestment in her character makes her appeal seem wooden.

The one time when Cunanan’s eyes suggest remorse comes when he sees his fragile mother being hounded by reporters outside her home.

Otherwise, Cunanan’s victims flicker on the screen like Macbeth’s ghosts, and finally he is visited by one — himself, as a child of around 11. And then we have the “Rosebud” moment: a scene in which we return to a San Francisco opera house where, it is imagined, Versace and Cunanan met during a 1990 production of “Capriccio” that Versace designed.

Cunanan, at that point 21, tries to kiss Versace, but the designer turns away.

“It’s not because don’t find you attractive,” Versace says. “I invited you here because you are a very interesting young man. I want you to be inspired by this, to be nourished by tonight. If we kissed, you may doubt it.”

Versace, in this telling, had some useful advice for Cunanan: Success isn’t about convincing people that you’re special. Success is about hard work. It is sad that Cunanan didn’t learn this from his deadbeat father, but it takes us nowhere in explaining the blood thirst that followed.

Homophobia, mixed-race identity, sexual abuse, the lust for fame, the worship of celebrity — each of these themes is brought forward and then discarded.

Like many a true-crime drama, this second season of “American Crime Story” was more interested in the journey than the destination. I get it. But in the end, like Cunanan himself, the show was a beautiful, glittery, violent, extravagant mess.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Season Finale: A Perfect Boy