FX’s widely celebrated O.J. Simpson “American Crime Story” focused on the theatrics and hijinks of the celebrity athlete’s televised murder trial and the colorful characters involved.
Don’t expect any such amusement from “Crime Story’s” second season, which details the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace in the summer of 1997 and the events leading up to him being gunned down.
While viewing the first four episodes, I didn’t smile once. What I did feel was stunned, sad, chilled, mortified and thoroughly sickened, as if someone had delivered a hard punch to my gut.
The drama is breathtakingly beautiful at times, inviting us into the opulent, glamorous and often decadent world of Versace (Emmy-nominated Edgar Ramirez, “Carlos”), his handsome longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and his fiercely devoted sister Donatella (Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz), a realm made even more dreamy by pastel-washed Miami.
But that’s only the backdrop. This new nine-part “American Crime Story” is primarily a no-holds-barred depiction of the horrific crimes of sociopath Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, “Glee”), his calculated killing of Versace, the gruesome slayings that preceded it and the effect on the various victims’ friends and families.
“Every season of this show will have a different tonality,” co-executive producer Ryan Murphy told TV critics at a recent FX press session in Pasadena, California. “The first season was very much a courtroom pot boiler. The second season that you’ve seen is a manhunt thriller.
“I loved that this was not glamorizing the Cunanan story, and we never want to do that on this show,” Murphy added. “I really loved how we laid into everybody who was affected, not just the people who were killed, but also the relatives, the siblings. I think what (Cunanan) did was very, very destructive, and the reasons why he did it — the homophobia of the day, which still persists — is something really topical.”
What both series have in common is they’re topical and reflective of the day.
“With ‘O.J.’ we looked at sexism and racism, and we are doing the same with this season,” Murphy said.
As for the drama’s honesty, the Versace family recently decried it as “fiction.” However, journalist and author Maureen Orth, whose book “Vulgar Favors” served as the basis for the drama, stands by its authenticity.
“I would say my sourcing in the book is 95 percent or more on the record, and I talked to over 400 people, and so, so many things that you might think were made up aren’t made up,” Orth said.
As indicated before, it’s not an easily digested story: Each of the murders is terrifying, as is Cunanan’s manipulation and shaming of his victims.
However, it’s portrayed with such realism and emotional commitment by its magnetic and meticulous cast that you are hooked instantly and will want to see it through to its conclusion.
The stars met with us to share their feelings about the characters they play and how being part of such a sad, brutal and disturbing series affected their lives.
Murphy said Ramirez was the only central cast member who didn’t instantly say yes when approached.
The actor eventually was convinced, however, and said he came away surprised by what he learned about Versace the man: “How family oriented he was and how strong those family ties were and how important they were in his life. And how rather subtle and intimate and private he was in comparison to the public perception of the House of Versace.”
“He was rather a quiet person that would go kind of shy, you know, extroverted, but shy at the same time,” Ramirez said. “And he would go to bed rather early and wake up rather early and had more the demeanor and the life of a craftsman than like a larger-than-life celebrity. So that’s something that even to me was very surprising.”
Martin, known best as the Latin pop star who gave us hits such as “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” said he had a conversation with his character, D’Amico, to assure him that his relationship with Versace would be “treated with utmost respect.”
“I told him, ‘I will make sure that people fall in love with your relationship with Gianni. That is what I’m here for. I really want them to see the beauty and the connection that you guys had.’”
He also got the biggest laugh during the FX press session. “I peed a little bit,” he said when he learned Donatella would be played by Penelope Cruz.
As for Criss, people who’ve seen him in lighter roles, such as the singing-dancing Blaine in “Glee,” no doubt will be astonished by the intensity of the actor’s performance here, particularly when the sadistic side of Cunanan comes out.
However, Criss made sure he also found something likable about Cunanan, such as his charm, to turn in a fleshed-out portrayal.
To preserve his sanity through filming, he said, the role “didn’t come home with me. I know a lot of people who jump into these kinds of things, and it really consumes their whole lives. And maybe that’s just the kind of person I am, but my alibi of how that, sort of, works is I think what saved me is that Andrew compartmentalized so many things in his life: emotions, people, experiences. He could disassociate, and likewise, I could sort of disassociate.”
Tag: review
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Review: A Focus on the Manhunt
The Versace family was not pleased, to put it mildly, with “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and has, in advance of the air date, issued a statement describing the FX series as a fiction, and inaccurate, which it may well be here and there and perhaps everywhere. Another kind of fiction suggests itself early in the series when it becomes evident—despite the title, and the extravagant publicity displays of Versace images—just how little, comparatively speaking, this tale has to do with the 1997 murder of the designer (portrayed by Edgar Ramirez), or with the Versace family, represented by Gianni’s sister Donatella (a lethally hysterical Penelope Cruz).
Based on Maureen Orth’s “Vulgar Favors,” the central drama here—notwithstanding deadly intermittent efforts to drag things back to the Versaces—concerns serial killer Andrew Cunanan ( Darren Criss ), who murdered five men in a three-month period, four of them gay, and two of them wealthy and accomplished men of advanced age. Versace was the fifth and last victim, shot in front of his Miami residence. The narrative focus on Cunanan—he’s the story—is what holds this 10-part saga together, and it does so compellingly throughout.
It does so despite the periodic returns to the Versaces—scenes that look back on the young Gianni’s dreams of a career in designing, or on Gianni and Donatella arguing about whether publicity was more valuable to a designer than the artistic merit of his clothes. Gianni holds out staunchly for the superior value of art, it will come as no surprise. In another exchange Gianni and Donatella share their views on the meaning of creativity. There’s good reason, in short, for the sense of relief that comes flooding in each time we depart the precincts of art and culture represented by the Versace household of this film to return to the world of a serial killer.
That world is evoked in elaborate detail, telling in its observation, unsparing in its brutality. Mr. Criss is never less than persuasive as the well-educated, well-read and attractive charmer who murdered two of his former lovers when—according to the film’s version of his life—they rejected his lies about his fabulous background and achievements. In doing so, they had rejected him.
Both the slaying of the two men, David Madson (Cody Fern) and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock)—each a vivid character—and the slow, chilling journey from loving friendship to murder are haunting in ways the rest of the film’s violent episodes are not. Which isn’t to say that the killer’s obvious designs on his next victims aren’t powerfully rendered. But what they’ve become, as his spree progresses—and Cunanan has been added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List—is familiar, impersonal, and ever more incomprehensible.
All the more reason to appreciate the expanded role given the family of Chicago architect Lee Miglin (an impressive performance by Mike Farrell), one of Cunanan’s rich elderly victims and a closeted gay man. His devoted wife, Marilyn (Judith Light), who has a highly visible career of her own, is determined to thwart any report on her husband’s brutal murder that suggests it had anything to do with his hidden sexual life. A life of which she’s clearly aware, as her knowing look and tense, forbidding silences show—exactly the kind of presence Ms. Light knows how to project, and she does it here with consummate skill. You don’t want to tangle with Marilyn—we feel it, and more to the point the police feel it.
All of which is meant to express one of the film’s many social messages about gay life, in this case that shame over a loved one’s gay identity could be so great that the bereaved wife in question is willing to subvert the police hunt for the real killer, by insisting publicly—she does it on television—on passing the murder off as a random act by a burglar.
The show’s most coherent and eloquent chapter doesn’t come till the story is nearing its end: the penultimate episode in which Cunanan’s childhood, and his family background, stand revealed. Here’s his powerful con man of a father, Modesto—a role Jon Jon Briones carries off superbly—a tyrant filled with delusions of omnipotence and faith in his capacity to outsmart most of the world. All were qualities his youngest son, Andrew, appears to have absorbed. He was his father’s favorite, the son he nurtured as special and showered with gifts and privileges given to no other child as he tutored his boy in the way to get on in the world. What his four-square heterosexual parent never counted on was a son who would put those skills to work making his way through life attracting well-heeled gay men.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Review: A Focus on the Manhunt
‘Black Lightning’: CW series is electrifying
‘Gianni Versace’
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” takes a meticulous approach to staging its title, set on Miami Beach, in the premiere at 10 p.m. Wednesday on FX. The start offers a grim mix of glamour, gore and voyeurism.
Darren Criss is chilling as Andrew Cunanan, who gunned down the fashion designer in 1997, but does the serial killer merit an eight-part series?
The strong cast includes Édgar Ramírez (as Versace), Penélope Cruz (as sister Donatella Versace), Ricky Martin and Judith Light. The series carries the “American Crime Story” brand, which delivered a classic about O.J. Simpson. “Versace” feels stretched and padded.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ and ‘I, Tonya’ Interrogate a Moral Gray Zone
The new FX series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has a famous fashion designer in its title–but the show is much more interested in his killer. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), before he goes to kill Versace in Miami in 1997, spends his young life in pursuit of status and material wealth. He’s fascinated by opera–or at least claims to be to meet rich men–and the association fits: the form’s unironically bold emotions seem to suit Cunanan’s roiling inner life, and its lavish stagings are a reminder of all he wants but can’t access when the curtain falls.
Versace wants to be an opera too. The show, cribbing from recent-enough history to build a narrative of increasingly high dudgeon, is rigorous about its devotion to aesthetic and to its big ideas about culture and society. Along with the new movie I, Tonya, it’s among a recent wave of entertainment that repurposes the half-forgotten scandals of the 1990s into morally righteous art. Even when the result falls flat–which it often does–the impulse to create it makes sense: at a moment when offscreen life feels particularly unsettled, the media scandals of two decades ago are as suitably perverse a place as any to try to find something clear and certain.
There’s plenty of certitude in Versace, which is unabashed about underlining its theses over and over. One of these is the idea that a borderline-malicious lack of interest in gay men on the part of the police led them to miss out on apprehending Cunanan before he made his appointment with the doomed Versace. But the show’s bigger point is that the concept of the closet is a sickness that hurt Cunanan and hurts our culture on every level. Between their separate story lines, Cunanan and Versace (Édgar Ramírez) take a sort of Forrest Gump tour through every milestone for the gay community in the 1990s–coming out, the AIDS crisis, high society, crystal meth and “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
All of that could be argued to be part of the saga, but how much of it is really part of this particular story? The military policy on gays, for instance, arises in a lengthy digression about a gay naval officer (Finn Wittrock) who falls under Cunanan’s sway. Elsewhere, another victim (Mike Farrell) is imagined as a closeted fellow besotted with Cunanan even as he hates his own gay impulses. We do not know whether this victim knew Cunanan in real life, or what the nature of the association was. Choosing to make the victim a heartsick, tragically closeted man is the easy choice in order to garner sympathy from an audience that’s come a long way–though hardly all the way–on the issue of gay rights. Sure, people in the 1990s (as now) withered away in the closet–but everyone Cunanan encounters seems burdened by their urges. The fact that Cunanan tends to see the world according to his own strict-if-warped moral code becomes less character trait than understandable way of dealing with the world around him. After all, everyone he meets seems punishingly aware of their own shortcomings. But what a shame: these men were already murder victims. Must this series force them to play the victim in life too?
Meanwhile, Versace lives his life, unaware of the creature coming his way. His sections of the story are stronger: Versace is just a man, in thrall of pleasure but just about the only person onscreen who is not toxically addicted to it. (That he’s portrayed so evenhandedly suggests fealty to the Versace name, or a minor miracle.) The story is tragic, certainly, but it also can be read as a lurid one-liner: monster kills star, motive unknown. Morals suggest themselves in the spaces between what is known, but airing them at great length seems a disservice to the story we actually have.
Of course, the true-crime genre–which often speculates about the unknowns in cases like Cunanan’s–is nothing new. But there’s a special fascination with a story of this particular timing, one that’s old enough to be history but recent enough to allow us to feel shocked at just how much has changed. Pop culture has always worked on a 20-year nostalgia cycle; here, that seems in part motivated by the degree to which the audience can give itself a nod of approval–we’re much more enlightened now than they were not so long ago. Things really were simpler then, and retro entertainment like Versace gives us the double comfort of understanding that we’ve got it all figured out now and escapism from our growing existential fears that we don’t.
What made The People v. O.J. Simpson, the previous installment in producer Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise, work was the effortlessness with which it found resonance between Simpson’s case and our lives in the present. That story’s elements of class, race, gender and celebrity needed no massaging to fit into a narrative urgently relevant to our lives in the 2010s. It succeeded because the details of that trial are so widely known as to make excavating the real figures from behind the headlines possible, and endlessly interesting.
Cunanan, a shadowy figure even to journalists who’ve tried to understand his story, is knottier, and less easily understood. Reducing him to a morality-play story of a boy warped by his secrets is unsatisfying. It’s enough to make it relevant to an empathetic contemporary audience, but it’s not enough for a drama that uses the names and personae of people who really lived.
…
Cunanan and Harding were two of the defining sensations of the 1990s, a peacetime decade during which tabloid stories colonized the front page. That neither were, or are, widely understood comes with the territory. And while FX’s Simpson series proved there’s room for real and thoughtful exploration of the people behind the boldfaced names, resonance can’t be forced. Reading Cunanan’s warped journey through America as tragically consequent to the gay experience, rather than the random actions of a psychopath, flatters an audience that feels sympathetically toward gay people. And reading Harding’s story as Real Housewives–level exaggerated but off-limits for real irony flatters an audience that likes edge, but not too much.
Part of what makes the real stories interesting is the ways in which their details exist in a moral gray zone: we’ll never know what pushed Cunanan, or if he could have been somehow saved. And the debate about Harding’s culpability, among those genuinely interested in the facts of her case, could go on for decades more. For now, I, Tonya seems to have settled the debate among casual fans: Harding is enjoying a media renaissance as the subject of sympathetic interviews, and has announced a return to the rink. “Tonya was the victim” may be less chewily satisfying than really digging into her story, just as FX’s Cunanan will never fascinate in the way the real one, with the contradictions and silences in his story, has for decades. But which one–the comfortingly safe interpretation or the violent, odd, real one–is likelier to sell tickets? A good opera demands a happy ending, even if that happy ending is just the pleasant sensation of an audience’s preconceptions being confirmed.
We’ve gotten these stories back at a moment when seeking deeper meaning in pop culture seems especially urgent. (Who understands the national political scene better than a viewer who spent her 2000s watching reality TV?) And many younger viewers will encounter these tabloid stories for the first time this winter. But in so relentlessly bending the stories to the will of the moment–one in which perceived villains deserve their moment of redemption, or at least bend-over-backward justification–their creators miss out on making something that will last. No matter how assured of their rightness the fictions may be, how long will we be talking about The Assassination of Gianni Versace and I, Tonya? Probably less time than we will spend still intrigued by Andrew Cunanan and Tonya Harding. Their true stories, messy and unresolved, still have the quality of the most meaningfully provocative of art.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ and ‘I, Tonya’ Interrogate a Moral Gray Zone
Tuned In: Another excellent true crime tale in FX’s ‘Versace’
PASADENA, Calif. — The most interesting character in FX’s heartbreaking and engrossing “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” (10 p.m. Jan. 17) is not Gianni Versace.
Versace (Edgar Ramirez) is probably the fifth most interesting character after his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), and three of Cunanan’s earlier, largely unknown victims.
Featuring an Emmy-worthy performance by Mr. Criss, “Versace” is as much a true-crime story as it is an exploration of the cultural climate for gay men in America in the 1990s. Through this lens viewers see the cruelty and damaging unfairness of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the pain of alienation for gay men who felt they could not be open with their families.
“Versace” is not perfect — some episodes meander a bit and anytime the story takes viewers back to Versace and away from the other victims, it becomes less compelling — but it marks an early, strong entry for one of the best series of 2018.
The series begins with Versace’s 1997 Miami Beach murder and each episode that follows goes further back in time, tracing Cunanan’s path from fame-and-wealth-seeking compulsive liar and fabulist to murderer. It’s not an effort on the part of producers to humanize Cunanan as much as it is an attempt to explain how he could commit such atrocious acts of violence.
There are a bounty of strong supporting players in “Versace,” including Mike Farrell (“MAS*H”), Judith Light (“Transparent”), Finn Wittrock (“American Horror Story”) and newcomer Cody Fern, but the true breakout performance comes from Mr. Criss, who capably inhabits the role of the sometimes desperate, sometimes pathetic and often creepy Cunanan.
“Versace” may not be quite on the level of the last “American Crime Story” installment, “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” but as true crime TV dramatizations go, it comes close.
‘Versace’ veracity
But here’s an important aspect of “Versace” that viewers need to understand: It’s a well-made drama but large swaths of it — particularly in episodes four, five and six that purport to show Cunanan with his earlier victims — are entirely speculative. No one knows the details of what happened between Cunanan and his victims because Cunanan and the victims were all dead before anyone could investigate the case.
The Versace family has disavowed the series issuing a statement to say “this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.“
Writer Tom Rob Smith (“London Spy”), working from the Maureen Orth book “Vulgar Favors,” acknowledged that he often had to begin with “a tiny pinpoint of a fact” and build the story from there, particularly when Cunanan is shown holding one of his victims at gunpoint.
“So we are trying to imagine a journey. We know the, sort of, shape of it,” he said. “We know that they must have gotten to a point where they were, at some level, working together. He wasn’t running away. Was he at gunpoint? And then, at some point, he was begging [based on the wounds on his body]. What was that conversation like? So you have these tiny points of truth, and you then try to connect the tissue between it. But I would never use the word ‘embellishing’ or ‘making up.’ It’s trying to join those pinpoints.”
Some may also quibble with the show’s title. To suggest the murder was for political reasons requires knowing what Cunanan was thinking, but executive producer Ryan Murphy defends the title.
“This was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out them and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live,” Mr. Murphy said at an FX press conference earlier this month. “I do feel like any time that you methodically plot to kill someone with pain and murder in your heart to expose them for something, that is an assassination and so I feel like the title was important politically for us to say, and I also believe that that’s what it was.”
Mr. Smith said despite killing multiple people in a spree, he sees Cunanan as more of a terrorist than as a serial killer.
“What happens is once he’s lost everything and realizes that he can’t create, you have this fundamental choice in society,” Mr. Smith said, “which is either you build something that impresses someone, which is very hard, takes a lot of work, or if you can’t do that but you don’t want to accept anonymity, you can try to rip something down.”
Tuned In: Another excellent true crime tale in FX’s ‘Versace’
‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Is A Frustrating Showcase For Darren Criss [Review]
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with conventional, chronological cinematic storytelling, nor is there anything fundamentally good about non-linear structures in film. There must be a good reason to alter a story’s chronology, be it to convey a character’s subjective perception of events (“Memento”), to make a reveal at the most opportune moment (“The Usual Suspects”), or simply because you are Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”). To employ a reverse-chronological structure for no purpose other than to be unconventional would make for a very frustrating experience indeed.
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” tells the story of Andrew Cunanan, the real-life serial killer who murdered fashion icon Versace on the front steps of his villa. The series opens with Versace’s murder, and works backwards from there, exploring Cunanan’s life and previous murders. Occasionally, it checks in with Versace in the years leading up to his death.
Cunanan is played by Darren Criss, and if there’s any takeaway from this whole endeavor it’s that Criss is a monumental talent and that will almost certainly win “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or TV Movie” at the next Emmys ceremony. He’s breathtaking as Cunanan, a pathological liar and attention seeker who presents himself as being a dapper man-about-town with charisma to spare (he charms an American Express customer service agent into extending his line of credit over the phone — while simultaneously injecting heroin into his toe on the floor of his crappy motel room).
When “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is great, it’s because of Criss’s performance. Whether Cunanan is lying his way into bed with the love of his life (a handsome young man by the name of David Madson, who ends up one of Cunanan’s early murder victims) or tracking his deadbeat father to the Philippines in the show’s most heartbreaking sequence, Criss plays it with just the ration of psychotic and pathetic. His performance is so outstanding that it’s a pity creator Ryan Murphythought it necessary to underscore so many of his scenes with comically ominous music. Criss gets these shades of his character just right; the musical assist does nothing other than to push the show into melodrama.
Murphy’s insecurity here is apparent not just in the show’s unnecessarily pointed score. The underlying problem with all ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ is its very structure. Here we have a story that would be maximally effective if told in traditional, boring, plain-old chronological order. It’s a story of a young man with a troubled past, whose sanity and personhood are stripped away by the circumstances of his life, until the tragedy of his life manifests in the most violent of ways. Watching as Cunanan’s mental stability wavered little by little, his pathological lying and violent tendencies increasing as time went on might not have been the most radical of viewing experiences, but could still have been fascinating — and even outstanding. But instead of letting the story, and characters speak for themselves, Murphy has decided to tell Cunanan’s story in reverse chronological order. The series begins with Versace’s assassination, moves backwards through each of Cunanan’s previous victims, and ends up at Cunanan’s childhood. The idea here is ostensibly to reveal Cunanan’s traumatic backstory only after showing us the crimes he committed as an adult.
This non-linear device is infuriating. Murphy’s method of dispensing information is flawed; he’ll have a character tell the story of their relationship with Cunanan in one episode only to spend the entirety of the subsequent episode showing us that same story — a story that we already know. There are full episodes that function as prequels to previous episodes, never shedding any light onto Cunanan’s motivations or characters — because none of the information is new.
The show’s midsection — episodes 3 through 6 — tell the story of Andrew’s first four murders. It’s not all bad (Andrew’s relationship with David, while frustratingly told, is a fascinating, and at times heartbreaking, story), but mostly it feels like network-TV serial-killer procedural fare, the sort of thing that might have been super popular five years ago. There’s an episode devoted to the killing of real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin — you can, and probably should, skip the episode entirely. No new ideas are presented, nothing interesting occurs, and Judith Light is entirely wasted as Miglin’s wife (herself a hugely successful perfume icon).
The fifth episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ spends some time telling the tragic story of Jeff Trail — a man I’d never heard of, but who deserves recognition as a hero. Jeff, who is eventually murdered quite brutally by Andrew Cunanan, was a closeted gay man in the military during the era of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” His life unravels after he rescues a gay soldier from being murdered in his sleep, causing his superior officers to suspect Jeff himself of being gay. Jeff is played here by Finn Wittrock, who is brilliant in the role: strong, full of conviction, confused. However, the episode eventually circles back around to Jeff’s relationship with Cunanan, and ends up in the same cyclical repetitiveness that plagues ‘Versace’ throughout.
If the show’s later episodes presented Cunanan’s story in a more subjective light, if we were seeing the events unfold from the killer’s warped perspective, the retelling of these events might have been worthwhile. Instead, all that we get is information that we already knew, packaged in the bleak old veneer of a serial-killer procedural.
The series’ penultimate episode is likely its best. It tells the story of Andrew’s relationship with his father, Modesto Cunanan, played unconventionally by Jon Jon Briones. Modesto is a Filipino immigrant trying to make it as a stockbroker in America. We see a lot of adult Andrew in his father, who lies and cheats on a slightly less-ambitious scale to the one his son eventually will adopt. It’s the first episode to give us any insight into Andrew’s eventual actions, especially the pathological lying that becomes so much a part of who Andrew is. If only this was the first episode, and every episode after it chronological in nature, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” would have been infinitely more engaging. The missed opportunity here is staggering.
On the show’s periphery throughout is Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and his sister Donatella (Penélope Cruz). Theirs is not the story Murphy has set out to tell, not really, and it shows in every one of their scenes. We watch (in reverse chronology, natch) as Versace almost dies of AIDS, recovers miraculously, gets back on his feet… only to be murdered by Andrew Cunanan. The Versace story as told here isn’t particularly striking, is only periodically engaging; it feels a bit like an afterthought. Ramírez and Cruz are both excellent in the small roles that they have, but nothing that happens in this part of the show is especially noteworthy.
“American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” will have one lasting legacy: jumpstarting Darren Criss’s career as a respected TV actor. There will also probably be memes (Criss, dressed in a flashy red leather suit, dancing wildly to “Whip It” is particularly gif-able). But it has nothing on “The People v. O.J. Simpson, American Crime Story” whose success can be attributed to its absolutely riveting, character-based — albeit conventional — storytelling. [C+]
The Bay Area Reporter Online | As the dystopian world turns
FX has been promoting “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” Ryan Murphy’s latest creation, for months in sumptuous, super-saturated color. These promos have been visually stunning, even as the undercurrent of violence has never been more than a blink away, reminiscent of a Helmut Newton photo montage.
Last season’s “Feud” was tremendous, but “Versace” is brilliant. It is Ryan Murphy’s piece de resistance. It is the most breathtakingly real of all his creations and the gayest. It is an exquisite exposition of two lives running in parallel: that of the designer and that of his killer, serial murderer Andrew Cunanan.
In an opening scene, a detective asks Versace’s partner Antonio D’Amico, whose white shirt is stained with his lover’s blood, “But who was [Versace] really?” D’Amico takes a breath and says, “He was a genius.” Every scene plays like this, like grand opera, yet never over-the-top. It’s a balance that Murphy has not always been able to achieve, but when he has, the results have been perfection.
The cast is seamless. Darren Criss plays against type as the tortured killer Andrew Cunanan, in the role of his career. We were never fond of Criss’ bland Blaine on “Glee,” but here he sears through the story, projecting Cunanan’s mix of beauty and sociopathy with ease. Criss takes us deep into Cunanan, who developed shifting personae from the time he was in middle school, changing both his look and his affect to attract those he wanted in his orbit. Cunanan was also a life-long fabulist, and Murphy has written that deftly into the role.
Murphy told EW Criss was his only choice for the role after seeing him on Broadway in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” “I just knew he could do it,” Murphy asserted. “More than that, I knew that he was superhungry and ambitious. When I saw ‘Hedwig,’ I knew he was capable of great darkness.”
Come for Criss, stay for Ricky Martin (Versace’s partner Antonio D’Amico), Edgar Ramirez (Versace) and the sublime Penelope Cruz (Donatella Versace). Icing? Matt Bomer will direct the eighth episode. Premieres Jan. 17 on FX. Not to be missed.
The latest ‘American Crime Story’ takes on ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’
★★½
Despite its title, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not really about Gianni Versace. The second installment in executive producer Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series (after 2016’s highly popular and acclaimed The People v. O.J. Simpson), Assassination is really the story of Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), a serial killer who murdered four other people before making Versace (Édgar Ramirez) his final victim in July 1997. The first episode begins with Versace’s murder, and the rest of the season mostly works backward, tracking Cunanan as he targets his previous victims, while spending significantly less time on Versace’s professional and personal life.
The show’s big-name stars are Penélope Cruz as Versace’s sister Donatella and Ricky Martin as his longtime partner Antonio D’Amico, but Criss dominates every episode, and the entire middle stretch of the season features virtually no appearances from Versace or his associates. Even when those characters do appear, the writers struggle to connect storylines about Versace’s business and relationships with Cunanan’s days as a hustler preying on older, wealthy gay men. The backtracking narrative structure also finds the episodes frequently going in circles, as characters will describe a situation in detail that then plays out in exactly the same detail an episode later.
A manipulative sociopath and compulsive liar, Cunanan is a tough protagonist to invest in for nine episodes, and while Criss makes him suitably unsettling, the show too often skews more toward the sleazy excesses of a ’90s erotic thriller than the methodical refinement of something like The Talented Mr. Ripley. The previous season used the Simpson case to explore issues of race in America, albeit in a loud, hectoring manner, and Murphy and his collaborators try to tie Assassination’s disparate plot threads together by focusing on the difficulties of gay life in the ’90s. But the connections are thin, and some of the detours stray too far from what makes the story worth telling. The Simpson story is a sprawling saga that encompasses far more than its central crime; Assassination never manages to turn Versace’s murder into the same kind of miniseries-worthy epic.
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I’m also unsure about another new high-profile drama making its debut next week – FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”
There is a lot to like about the follow-up to “The People v. O.J. Simpson” which focuses on the death of fashion icon Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) at the hands of serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Based on the book “Vulgar Favors” by Maureen Orth, the 10-episode series jumps around in time to show us the lives of Cunanan and Versace and what led to that fateful shooting. The cast is outstanding, led by the downright chilling Criss. And Penelope Cruz is nearly unrecognizable as she truly becomes Donatella Versace. Plus, the premiere looks amazing thanks to the direction of executive producer Ryan Murphy.
The problem with “Versace” is that it just goes too far. Since Cunanan was a serial killer, you expect to see disturbing behavior depicted, but much of what we get is completely unnecessary and basically serves as sensationalist filler. The second episode was the last one I could handle after an extremely disturbing scene involving Cunanan in his underwear, duct tape and the music of Phil Collins.
“O.J.” was so brilliant that I know there has to be some of that same brilliance in “Versace” yet to come. But I don’t think I have the stomach to stick around for it.
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17, on FX.
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‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ traces the making of a monster – The Boston Globe
There are moments in FX’s outstanding “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” when serial killer Andrew Cunanan comes off like a horror movie villain. Played by Darren Criss, now many miles from “Glee,” Cunanan widens his eyes with loathing as if he’s about to explode into Leatherface from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” His round wire-framed glasses give him the air of an ordinary preppie, a civilized look he has carefully cultivated, but his eyes are like switchblades about to spring.
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” does, at times, try to explain to us how this desperate, heartless man evolved into a torturer and murderer by the time he was 27. We see how the social climber learns to fake it in order to make it, how his grifting ways grow increasingly ambitious and pretentious, how he exploits the gay closet for his own ends — at one point signing a postcard “Love, Andrew” and then “accidentally” mailing it to his closeted Navy friend’s parents. But most of all, the Cunanan we see in this series is a full-on monster, and his story is anything but a justification. It’s a portrait of a psychopathic con man who is, ultimately, an especially untalented Mr. Ripley.
Really, the most emotionally charged and sympathetic material in the series, which premieres next Wednesday at 10 p.m., belongs to Cunanan’s five victims and their families. The series, from Ryan Murphy, is remarkable for many reasons, one of which is how, in delivering a biography of sorts of Cunanan, it manages to humanize the people he hurt, not least of all Versace. The script, by Tom Rob Smith (“London Spy”), moves in reverse, beginning with the shooting of the fashion designer at his Miami home and then tracking back through Cunanan’s previous kills. Each murder scenario is haunting and specific, as Smith shows us in detail how the men — four were gay, one simply saw too much — wound up in Cunanan’s sights.
Mike Farrell makes an extraordinary appearance as deeply closeted Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, who is pulled into Cunanan’s web and left dead in his garage, gay pornography strewn around him. The outline of Miglin’s relationship with Cunanan is the clichéd tale of an older gay man succumbing to a handsome twink, but in the hands of Farrell (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Joe Biden here) and Criss, it transcends the familiarity. As Cunanan sadistically tapes up the terrified Miglin’s face, you can see Cunanan’s class envy come to a boil And the series also gives us an intimate view of Miglin’s cosmetics-infomercial-making wife, Marilyn Miglin, who is in fierce denial about her husband’s sexuality, even after his body is found. She is played by Judith Light in a brittle turn that will break your heart, as she does a poignant battle with shame.
We also spend quality time with two of the young men Cunanan killed in Minneapolis, David Madson (Cody Fern) and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), the Navy officer Cunanan outed. Madson refuses Cunanan’s persistent romantic interest, which Cunanan takes out first on Trail, whom he blames. This segment of Cunanan’s story is given a particular boost by Fern, who is brilliant as the despairing Madson is kidnapped by Cunanan while in disbelief over the cold-blooded murder of his friend. Fern, a relative newcomer, is unforgettable and, like a number of actors in this cast, deserves Emmy attention.
Versace, too, becomes fully human in the series, much more than the chic celebrity Cunanan was obsessed with. The Versace family has come out against the series, in a statement whose words include “reprehensible,” “distorted,” and “bogus,” but Edgar Ramirez gives us a warm, gentle man. His Versace is separated from ordinary people by his fame and his money, which is all over his lavish Miami manse, but he is also a man who is ultimately willing to jeopardize his business in order to come out as gay. He has an open relationship with his boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), which appears to work for them both, and he has a particularly tight bond with his sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), who takes over the business after his death. Cruz is solid in a role that, as Maya Rudolph on “Saturday Night Live” has shown, could easily fall into parody. Her accent, though, is inconsistent.
The first season of Murphy’s anthology series “American Crime Story,” “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” beautifully reframed the famous murder case through a lens of race, sexism, and reality TV. I’m not sure “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” manages to add contemporary political and cultural resonance to its serial killer story as effectively. We can see that the cops appear not to take these murders and the pursuit of Cunanan as seriously as they should, once they learn of the gay aspect. They help create a systemic homophobia that may have helped Cunanan stay free long enough to kill more. We can also see how homophobia in 1997 America, the year Ellen DeGeneres came out, long before gay marriage, may have made some of the victims more vulnerable to Cunanan’s evil.
But “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is nonetheless extremely insightful, as well as consistently entertaining. And the details of Cunanan’s story are less familiar than those of Simpson, so the episodes work on a suspense level, too. You don’t quite know what will happen next. The year has just begun, and already I’m thinking about my year-end top 10 list.
‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ traces the making of a monster – The Boston Globe
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