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The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 1 review: a gossipy, killer slice of docudrama

Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace - Copyright 2017, FX Networks. All rights reserved.
Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace - Copyright 2017, FX Networks. All rights reserved.

An aura of decadent fabulousness lingers over The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The tragic fashion designer is introduced gliding about in a blinding pink dressing gown in his Versailles-like Miami palace – a riot of stucco and sunshine over which director and show-runner Ryan Murphy overlays sonorous opera. 

As if inspired by one of Versace’s swirling creations, Murphy wastes no time ratcheting up the overkill to a clanging crescendo in FX’s true crime follow up to 2016’s The People Vs. OJ Simpson.

Gunned down on his doorstep by the psychotic fabulist Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), Gianni Versace bleeds to death alongside a bloodied dove similarly, if inexplicably, pierced by a bullet. 

Storming on three quarters of the way in as Donatella Versace – Gianni’s beloved sister and heir –  Penélope Cruz adds to the excess with a performance as filthily ridiculous as her dirty blonde wig.  The most delicious aspect of the series, however, is its element of surprise.

Versace (Édgar Ramírez – whose performance is, weirdly, the most sober here) was a global fashion figure when cut down in July 1997 yet the details of his killing are not widely known. 

That’s in contrast to the OJ Simpson case, so embedded in our memories that watching Murphy recreate the events two years ago felt like participating in a game of true crime bingo. The Ford Bronco chase, the misogynistic humbling of Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran’s “if glove don’t fit” speech – all were dutifully trotted out, each beat as predictable as the chorus in a Justin Bieber song. 

Season two, by contrast, packs a gilded punch. The first episode bounces between the slaying of Versace to his first encounter, in a San Fransisco gay club, with Cunanan. The future killer is a Walter Mitty-like social climber whose life is wallpapered with so many habitual lies it’s unclear whether even he knows truth from fiction. Preppy of manner and soulless of gaze, he gives Murphy something the Simpson case lacked – an unambiguous villain scary even when he isn’t shooting dead international fashion designers. 

American Crime Story: Versace cast and characters
American Crime Story: Versace cast and characters

As Donatella, Cruz meanwhile cuts a furious swathe. She trowels on the accent and affectations quite gleefully: a little thrill is sure to run through you every time she flutters her reptilian eye-lids or pronounces “company” as “kuuumpany” (perhaps unsurprisingly the Versace family have dismissed the series as fantasy). 

Even more impressive is pop star Ricky Martin as Gianni’s devastated romantic partner Antonio D'Amico. It’s 1997 in Miami but gay rights are still an evolving concept as made clear when Detective Scrimshaw (Will Chase) casually asks the grieving D’Amico whether, after 15 years together, Versace was paying his lover for services rendered in the bedroom.

Amid the towering chintz and power-house performances, there’s a slight clumsiness to the interweaving of the murder hunt with wrangling over the future of the Versace empire (Donatella wants to delay plans to float the “kuuumpany” on the stock exchange). But the bare facts of the case are so intriguing, the evocation of Nineties Miami so searing, as to paper over the structural clunkiness.

With American Crime Story season two, Murphy has served up another killer slice of documudrama – a lush, gossipy tour de force that dazzles and tantalises in equal measure.