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

Episode 8: ‘Creator/Destroyer’

The penultimate episode of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” is a remarkable hour of television. It is a parallel portrait of two childhoods: those of Versace, the renowned fashion designer, and Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who shot him to death in 1997. It is a parallel portrait of a father and son: Modesto Cunanan and his darling youngest child, Andrew. And it is a rare, nuanced depiction of an Asian American family that finds heartbreak, not fulfillment, in its pursuit of the American dream.

The episode seems to offer some of the missing pieces of an explanation for Cunanan’s murderous pathology. It is such a masterly hour of drama that I’m tempted to say our patience has been rewarded. Yet, for reasons I’ll explain, I felt somewhat shortchanged: One hour of great television can only do so much to make up for hours of grisly and often hard-to-watch violence. This series has been told in reverse chronological order, putting tremendous weight on the final two episodes to explain the chaos and bloodshed we’ve experienced in the first seven.

The episode begins pleasantly enough. We learn that Versace, growing up in Calabria in austere postwar Italy, was encouraged by his mother, herself a dressmaker, to follow his dreams.

“I see you watching me work,” she gently little Gianni. “There is no need to hide.”

She explains that she wanted to be a doctor as a child, but that her father discouraged her. “You must do what you love, Gianni, what you feel inside here,” she tells her son, tapping his chest. With that encouragement — and in spite of homophobic mocking by a teacher — Gianni begins his rise, one grounded in technical virtuosity and boldness of vision.

Andrew Cunanan’s early years, we learn, were in most respects considerably more complicated.

It is 1980 and the Cunanan family — Modesto (played by a fantastic Jon Jon Briones), who is Filipino; his wife, Mary Ann; and their four children — are moving into a spacious new home in San Diego. Andrew turned 11 that summer. Modesto leads his youngest child — whom an older brother calls “Prince Andrew” — on a tour of the new house. He is given the master bedroom. It is clear that his parents have marked him as special, and not just in the way youngest children are often doted on.

As Andrew interviews for the Bishop’s School, an elite private academy, Modesto interviews at Merrill Lynch. Modesto’s charm is on full display. “Gentlemen, I’m aware that you have a long line of eager Ivy League-educated young men queuing up to be brokers at Merrill Lynch, but ask yourself, how many of them started from nothing?” he asks. When asked to discuss business, not his biography, he protests: “My life is a tale told in dollars,” he tells them, which started in a small village in the Philippines and wound up in an $80,000 home.

“Now is that biography or business?” he asks. “Because I will tell your investors that’s what I plan to do with their money. I will cross oceans with it. I will take it to new lands. I’m talking about growth they can’t imagine.” The monologue is notable because it is so much like the fantastic tales that Andrew will later tell to the many gay men he will try to impress. Modesto gets the job.

Young Andrew, meanwhile, is accepted to the Bishop’s School, after telling the interviewers that his one wish is “to be special.”

It is a high point for the father and son, whose lives start to go down from this point.

But first we learn about the family’s unusual and troubling dynamics. Modesto spoils Andrew to the point of buying a car for him, even though he is too young for a license. Even more troubling, Modesto is physically abusive to his wife, Mary Ann, whom he holds in contempt for her “weak mind.” And his obsession with Andrew is clearly unhealthy. In one particularly disturbing scene at bed time, there’s an intimation of possible sexual abuse. The scene goes dark, and we’re left to wonder. But the effect is unsettling regardless.

Flash forward a few years, to 1987: Andrew is 17 and finishing high school, and he has carved out an identity for himself: flamboyant, exuberant and carefree. Despite a homophobic taunt, he unbuttons his shirt for a school photo. He is determined not to conform. In his high school yearbook, he is voted “most likely to be remembered.” Under his photo is the slogan, “Après moi, le déluge.”

Modesto is meanwhile in serious trouble. Having left Merrill Lynch (presumably for underperforming, as is hinted at in earlier scenes), he now works for a smaller stockbroker, where he is accused of trying to fleece a 90-year-old woman of her life savings. F.B.I. agents arrive at his office; Modesto escapes out the back and races home. He runs upstairs, pries open a floorboard, grabs cash and passports and puts them in a bag. When Mary Ann asks what is happening, he violently shoves her aside. As agents enter the house from the front, Modesto again flees out the back, climbing over a wall … where he encounters Andrew.

“Don’t believe a word they say,” Modesto tells Andrew as he takes his son’s car and flees to the Philippines.

Convinced that Modesto must have stored money away somewhere, Andrew flies to Manila, and — in the most stunning scene of this series so far — confronts his father in what is essentially a tree-canopy-covered shack in the village where Modesto is living.

The father puts down the newspaper he is reading and offers his son another in a long line of fraudulent smiles. “I knew you’d come,” he tells Andrew, as if selling him a used car.

Asked where the money is, Modesto spins again, insisting that there are “millions” but “out of reach.” Later in the night, Andrew wakes up and confronts his father. He knows that there is no money. “My father’s a thief,” he laments. Modesto lashes back:

Andrew is crushed. “You were everything to me, dad,” he says. “But if you’re a lie, then I’m a lie, and I can’t be a lie.” He bursts into tears, but Modesto won’t have it. “Weak, just like your mother,” he sneers. “The two of you talk about honesty, but she never cared that I was stealing as long as there was money.”

He slaps Andrew, spits in his face. Andrew grabs a knife, but he can’t use it. Instead he cuts himself, as he agonizes and holds himself back.

Back in California, Andrew applies for a job a drugstore. When the owner — a Filipino immigrant like Modesto — asks Andrew what his father does, he replies: “He owns multiple pineapple plantations. As far as the eye can see.” And so begins the big lie.

It’s remarkable television, evoking everything from the Madoff scandal (which also destroyed a son) to the dashed aspirations of “Death of a Salesman.” It reveals the dark side of the 1980s, when greed and fraud operated under the veneer of pastels and sunshine. It exposes, to an extent, the myth of the “model minority” that has hobbled Asian-Americans, and of the notion that hard work is all the American dream requires.

It is not, however, an entirely plausible explanation for how Andrew Cunanan became a mass murderer. I’m looking to the season finale to see if this series means to give us one.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 8: Prince Andrew

Episode 7: ‘Ascent’

Genius has been an underlying theme of this series, the second season of FX’s “American Crime Story” — specifically, the creative genius of Gianni Versace (and to a lesser extent, the young architect David Madson) and the pathological genius of Andrew Cunanan, whose capacity for deceit and violence is rare.

Episode 7 of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” reveals a different side of Versace’s genius — one that enabled him to build an institution and not just a brand. As this week’s episode relates, his genius was grounded in a gift for reading people, based on intuition and perception rather than on flashes of inspired brilliance.

In a series of flashbacks, we learn that Gianni, perhaps with a foretaste of his premature death, has begun to shore up his legacy by encouraging his most loyal helpmate — his sister, Donatella — to rise as his potential successor.

It is a kind of encouragement by tough love. As portrayed by Edgar Ramírez, Gianni has a fiery temperament and is prone to bursts of rage when he believes his exacting standards are not being met. “What are you?” he shouts at Donatella, played by a terrific Penélope Cruz, as he shoves aside a collection of drawings she has assembled for his review. “Are you a designer? No, what are you? Are you a collector of other people’s ideas?”

He fumes at her: “You have the opportunity to be great, and you choose to assist.”

Time is not on their side: Gianni is using a cane, and he is losing his hearing. The series has implied — as does “Vulgar Favors,” the book by the journalist Maureen Orth on which it is based — that Gianni is H.I.V.-positive. (The Versace family has disputed this.) After reconciling, Gianni tells a tearful Donatella that they will design a dress together, “as if it’s the last dress I will ever make.” He adds, with a touch of melodrama: “This dress is not my legacy. You are.”

Later, at the 1992 gala celebration in New York to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Vogue, Donatella unveils that bondage-themed dress, and it is an immediate sensation. The scene in which Gianni gently releases his sister’s hand, letting her inhabit the limelight alone as he moves to the side, is affecting.

It will be a five years until he is murdered in Miami Beach, but it is a premonition of what is to come.

Back in California, we learn more about Cunanan’s career as a rent boy in the years before the 1997 killings. In an unusually amusing scene in this fairly grim series, Andrew, played by Darren Criss, is working behind the counter at a Thrifty drugstore. (He tells a nonplused customer that he is holding down the job while completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego; in fact, he is a college dropout.)

Andrew’s boss, a man named Mr. Mercado, is an immigrant from the Philippines (like Andrew’s father, Modesto, whom we have not met), a map of which hangs in his sparsely furnished office. Mercado tells him to stop looking at Vogue while he’s on the clock.

“Does it ever bother you that the customers only know you as ‘That Helpful Man’?” Andrew asks Mercado. Mercado shrugs. Later, back at his mother’s apartment, Andrew reacts violently after discovering that she has bought a tub of Safeway ice cream rather than his preferred brand, Häagen-Dazs. His spite toward anything everyday — what in last week’s episode he derided as “ordinary” — is visceral and explosive. He slams the tub onto the kitchen floor, making a mess.

When his mother asks why it matters, Andrew tells her about Reuben Mattus, the brand’s founder, who made up its Danish-sounding name. It’s a brief but sad moment, one that reveals how consumer abundance, or the illusion of it, has made Andrew so petulant, childish and self-indulgent that he despises his own mother.

In the gay world, we soon learn, Andrew is more Safeway than Häagen-Dazs.

At a gay bar with his handsome friend Jeff, a Navy veteran, Andrew laments that he isn’t approached more by men; Jeff urges him to take the initiative, but Andrew fears rejection in the same way he fears getting his hands dirty. For him, it’s existential. “Being told no is like being told I don’t exist,” he says. “It’s like I’ve disappeared or something.”

People get rejected every day, and we may never truly understand why most move on with their lives while Andrew moved on to become a killer. But we’re learning more about just how pernicious his fear of invisibility is, even at this early stage. When Andrew visits an escort agency, its brusque manager wastes no time in informing Andrew about the customers’ preferences — another rejection. (“My clients never ask for Asians,” she says after asking him to drop his trousers. “And they never ask for Asians with attitude.”) Deciding he doesn’t need help finding a sugar daddy, he browses a local newspaper, studying the arts and philanthropy pages to identify suitable targets.

A target found, he stalks the La Jolla Playhouse for a performance of Marivaux’s 18th-century comic play “The Triumph of Love.” Just as planned, he catches the eye of Norman Blachford, a wealthy entrepreneur whose partner, as we know from last week’s episode, has recently died of AIDS. Andrew ends up becoming the kept man of Lincoln Aston, a friend of Norman’s.

It’s on Lincoln’s dime — purportedly to look into art acquisitions — that Andrew travels to San Francisco and buys a fateful drink for a handsome young man sitting alone at the bar. That man turns out to be David, the Minneapolis architect, who is visiting San Francisco for work. (Frustratingly, we never learn more about the friends with whom Andrew is dining.)

Up in Andrew’s suite, we get an inside look at that passionate night at the Mandarin Oriental — the one which meant so much to Andrew and, fatally, so much less to David. Dressed in their bathrobes after a steamy shower together, David tells Andrew about a childhood friend, Leah, who was tormented at school. He had promised to build her a house where they could escape from bullies. But later, when he told her he was gay, she never spoke to him again. “She must have felt betrayed,” he says.

Andrew looks as if he is ready to cry, and for the first time in this series, one sees traces of real empathy in him — an ability to take seriously the pain of others and to look beyond himself.

It is a fleeting moment. Back in San Diego, Lincoln is outraged to see a hotel bill that includes midnight Champagne. He cuts off the flow of funds.

Sadly, it was an unwise move: Lincoln returns to a gay bar, where he picks up a hustler and takes him home. The encounter does not end well: The man bludgeons Lincoln to death. Andrew, who was inside the apartment, evidently waiting for Lincoln, cowers in fear; the hustler, after a moment’s hesitation, does not attack him. “He tried to kiss me,” he tells Andrew, previewing the “gay panic” defense he will use to justify the attack.

Returning to Norman, Andrew feigns aggrievement over Lincoln’s gruesome death. “We fall sick, it’s our fault,” he says. “We’re murdered, it’s our fault. You can rob us, you can beat us, you can kill us and get away with it.”

But this moment of political awakening — if it can be called that — is short-lived. When Andrew tries to persuade Norman to come live with him in San Diego, it’s obvious he just wants the money. And the pool.

Loose Threads:

• According to Orth’s book, Lincoln Aston was, in fact, a wealthy gay man who was murdered in May 1995, after his relationship with Cunanan had cooled, but there is nothing to suggest that Cunanan was present for the crime. A man named Kevin Bond was convicted of the murder. The case was re-examined after Cunanan’s 1997 serial killings, but the police found no evidence that he was involved.

• Andrew tells his mother, MaryAnn, that he met Versace in San Francisco and now plans to travel the world with him. (We know from an early episode that the first part, at least, is true.) But when she begs Andrew to take her to Paris, she risks exposing his lies and clearly stokes his guilt. He lashes out, shoving her into a wall and fracturing her shoulder blade. It’s an ugly scene, and it reminds us just how dangerous Andrew’s hair-trigger temper is. He has a genius for rage, manipulation and deception, but not for basic human decency.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 7: Asians With Attitude