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Review 'The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story' is a painful and pointed look back
New American Crime Story explores another Nineties tabloid tale involving celebrities and *** – and the oppressiveness of the closet.
The summer of 1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace wakes up in his Miami Beach mansion, wearing pajama bottoms decorated with his own logo.
He slips into a hot-pink robe, then steps out onto the balcony to admire the morning sun over the ocean waves. He strolls through his gilded palace, greeting the servants who are already standing at attention in their places.
Versace plucks a glass of orange juice from a silver tray as he lounges to have breakfast – alone – by his pool.
Meanwhile, a psychopathic serial killer sits on the beach, with a handgun and a biography of Vogue founder Condé Nast. Within a few minutes, Versace will be dead.
The *** was a crime that shocked the world – a haute couture icon gunned down at the gates of his own mansion. In other words, a crime perfectly designed for Ryan Murphys pulp imagination.
He brings the case to life as the second installment of his American Crime Story anthology series, after making a huge splash with The People vs. O.J.
Simpson. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has all his favorite obsessions – sex, money, celebrity, glitz, the elusive boundaries of gay identity.
The designer was such a central figure in American culture in 1997, namechecked by Biggie in the summers ubiquitous hit Hypnotize. By the end of that summer, both the hip-legend and the fashion maven were handgun-*** victims, and Puff Daddy was onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards with Sting, urging the crowd to raise their hands for Biggie, Tupac.
O.J. Simpson was an L.A. story, and the Hollywood setting was part of why it worked so well, plugging veterans from John Travolta to David Schwimmer to Sterling K. Brown into the action – truly a story where Los Angeles plays itself.
But Assassination begins with the crime, then moves backward through the career of his killer Andrew Cunanan, a con man and grifter who was already on the FBIs Most Wanted list after murdering four other men around the country that year.
The story, scripted by Tom Rob Smith (London Spy), leaves the Versace-*** narrative on the backburner for much of the series, going into the backstory of how a closeted gay kid turned himself into a homicidal monster.
Darren Criss, leaving Glee far behind, is oily and terrifying as Cunanan, with desperate need in his eyes.
Its there in the way he primps for his first date with Versace back in 1990, after the designer invites him to the opera; he tries on somebody elses expensive suits while the radio plays Lisa Stansfields All Around The World. (By 1997, that was more famous as a Biggie/Puffy song.) Hes a social climber who sees Versace as his big score, even as he scoffs at the duds: They say Armani designs clothes for wives.
I think Versace designs clothes for ***..
Edgar Ramírez is charismatic yet warmly empathetic as Versace – as in his astounding performance as a Seventies terrorist in Carlos, the Venezuelan actor plays a man obsessed with his vision, determined to serve it at any cost.
Ricky Martin, in a performance way beyond what most people would expect from him, is Versaces bereaved boyfriend Antonio DAmico. Together they became a quintessential jet-set couple known around the globe, moving in rarefied circles.
At Versaces funeral, Princess Diana sat next to Elton John; just a few weeks later, the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road hitmaker was singing Candle in the Wind at her funeral.
Penélope Cruz is simply fearsome as the designers sister Donatella, who is no longer content to be a muse; she wants her own stake in running the business. Shes icy and imperious in her contempt for his boyfriend.
My brother has a weakness for beauty, Donatella sniffs. He forgives it anything.
But I am not my brother. She is such a flamboyant character, it’s difficult to play her without parody – as in Maya Rudolph’s great Saturday Night Live caricature, a diva constantly shrieking, Cue the rampage music! But Cruzs Donatella is no caricature; shes ruthless in her resolve to keep the House of Versace alive as an aesthetic.
As the lady says, My brother is still alive as long as Versace is still alive. I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice..
A tragic theme that runs through the story is the way gay culture was changing at warp speed through the Nineties.
It seemed like a much more liberated time than the Eighties, yet Assassination depicts how oppressive the closet still was in 1997. It was the year Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her sit.
, after dropping hints she was left-handed or Lebanese. Will & Grace was still a year away; the idea of gay marriage seemed like an impossible dream.
The cops in charge of the Versace case are baffled at the unthinkable notion of a gay couple sharing a domestic partnership – the officer who interrogates the boyfriend asks, What was your involvement with Mr Versace? The FBI agents are blinded by homophobia as they snicker over the pronunciation of Versaces name.
(The singer? Thats Liberace – this is the jeans guy.).
Although the Versace family has already denounced the series, this new American Crime Story presents the designer as a genuinely heroic figure: a visible gay man in the Nineties, living outside the closet in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier.
Part of the emotional power of Assassination is that the designer, in his own way, was helping the world make the transition into a different place – a transition he tragically didnt live long enough to see.
Review The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a painful and pointed look back. by Lorraine AliContact Reporter. the Assassination of Gianni Versace” and “The People v O.J.
Simpson” have much in common: Both series are part of FX’s “American Crime Story” anthology, both are scripted dramas that revisit 1990s celebrity crimes, and both are the work of mastermind Ryan Murphy.
Yet the Versace story, which premieres Wednesday, is a markedly different viewing experience from its award-winning predecessor.
There are no Marcia Clarks or Johnnie Cochrans in the Versace story, no bloody glove, no white Bronco. In short, the new series doesn’t coax audiences in with the familiar, dipped in decade-centric nostalgia.
Details surrounding the Italian fashion designer’s 1997 *** by serial killer Andrew Cunanan weren’t burned into the American psyche like those of the double homicide in the Simpson trial.
“Versace” sets out to make viewers care about a case most of them will barely remember. This is the show’s greatest challenge and its sharpest point.
Versace’s demise didn’t hit the same personal or political nerve with the American public or the media, largely because Cunanan was a male escort and the majority of his victims were gay.
While the *** made for salacious “Hard Copy” headlines, even as a victim Versace didn’t elicit the same kind of love as accused murderer Simpson. And here that disparity is painfully present across all nine episodes.
After the initial tabloid intrigue, his killing was largely considered a gay on gay crime. And in the wake of an AIDS epidemic, the inference was that these were risky men leading risky lifestyles, dabbling in the avoidable.
Ignorance and bigotry allowed much of America to emotionally divorce itself from the crime. The series attempts to recast Versace’s “assassination” at age 50 from a fading headline to a human tragedy, and for the most part succeeds.
In a painful scene after Versace (Édgar Ramírez) is found dying on the front steps of his South Beach mansion, his significant other, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), is grilled by a detective who can’t quite grasp what kind of partner D’Amico is (“business?”).
And, if they were romantically involved, why were they bringing other men home from clubs? It’s D’Amico who ends up being interrogated about his lifestyle rather than possible suspects.
Penélope Cruz is stone-cold perfect as Versace’s muse and sister, the hardened Donatella, and Darren Criss is chillingly convincing as the psychopathic Cunanan.
The downside here is that this series, based on actual events and inspired by Maureen Orths book “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History,” is sometimes too dark and brutal in its re-creation of the murders.
The very nature of the crimes, sadistic and premeditated, makes this series far more grim than “The People v O.J.
Simpson.” It demands that viewers pay attention to homicides that went largely unnoticed until Versace’s, and it’s a lot to ask. The victims include Cunanan’s ex-lover and Chicago tycoon Lee Miglin.
Like many of Murphy’s projects, cultural context is half the story here. The same America that gave rise to celebrated designer Versace also fostered the monstrous Cunanan. The series encapsulates that dichotomy and the societal and systemic prejudices that link them.
Homophobia, in essence, allowed Cunanan to kill his way from San Diego to the East Coast with relative ease.
Police who’d been persecuting the gay community weren’t ready to protect it, and Cunanan’s surviving victims were reticent to speak up for fear of being ostracized or worse.
The second installment of the “American Crime Story” anthology lends these victims the respect they deserve. It’s up to viewers to decide whether they’re willing to explore the pain and injustice just beneath the tabloid headlines.