SOME OF THE BEST TV IS LIMITED: I mean limited series, a category filled with some of the year’s best goodies. Do not, I repeat, do not ignore “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” one of the year’s most riveting TV stories, and take special notice of its performances. And do not, I repeat, do not go gaga for “Twin Peaks,” which — and I know this is controversial — was significant simply for being so stubbornly self-referential and inscrutable. Be sure to check out the other Margaret Atwood adaptation, “Alias Grace,” which took on memory, storytelling, and the history of sexism. And don’t forget about “Howards End.” Yeah, yeah, I know those British costume dramas seem like they’re a dime a dozen, but the good ones, like “Howards End,” definitely are not.
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Judith Light shines in yet another role – The Boston Globe
I remember Judith Light from her days on “One Life to Live,” when she brought the character of Karen Wolek from prostitution to the witness protection program in Canada, where, I imagine, she continues to thrive.
Since those days, Light has done all kinds of material, from the flimsy — “Who’s the Boss?” and the “Dallas” reboot — to the formidable, including the stage show “Wit” in 1999 and a pair of back-to-back Tony-winning performances in Broadway shows in 2012 and 2013. Lately, I’ve loved her in “Transparent,” as Shelly Pfefferman.
On Wednesday night, Light delivers yet another remarkable performance, in FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” alongside Mike Farrell. She is Marilyn Miglin, the wife of Farrell’s Lee Miglin, a Chicago real estate tycoon. One weekend, when Marilyn is out of town filming an infomercial for her successful line of cosmetics, the closeted Lee has Andrew Cunanan over to their deluxe apartment for a date. It doesn’t end well, as you can imagine, with Farrell (who absolutely must play Joe Biden someday) winding up dead on the garage floor surrounded by gay magazines carefully placed there by Cunanan.
Marilyn returns to the crime scene, and her denial about her husband only escalates. Watching Light play out this powerful woman’s refusal to take in the truth is heartbreaking. She gives us a spouse waging a quiet, stoic war against her loss and her humiliation. She has roused all of her strength in service of their social reputation.
This tense series goes deep on Cunanan, but it simultaneously makes the victims — and, in this case, their family — into full human beings.
Darren Criss revives a monster in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ – The Boston Globe
Are you watching “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”? I’m loving it for a number of reasons, not least of all the performances. It begins with Darren Criss’s Andrew Cunanan shooting Gianni Versace on his mansion steps, then moves backward across the season to chronicle his previous four murders.
As Cunanan, Criss is surprisingly good — surprising, if you only know him from “Glee” as the openly gay student Blaine, who went on to marry Kurt. He’s creepy and slippery as the killer who, Mr. Ripley-like, pathologically lies his way into the lives of wealthy gay men, many of them closeted. He’s a primping, rabid social climber who carefully studies and researches his prey, with Versace — with whom he has a date years before the murder — as his big goal.
I can’t say Criss humanizes Cunanan, even as he removes layer after layer of Cunanan’s armor as the script moves back to his formative years. And that’s a good thing; we get to see what may have contributed to his devolution, and the way he is a creature of homophobia as well as an exploiter of it, but we are never asked to see him sympathetically. He’s clearly a grandiose monster of bottomless insecurity. But then Criss also allows us to see how Cunanan managed to con smart men, how he remade his hatred into a kind of aggressive come-on in certain situations.
Criss delivers an energetic, committed, and thoroughly macabre turn that holds the nine-episode series together. In “Glee,” he was dreamy; in “Versace,” he’s the stuff of nightmares.
‘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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