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 Murphy thought 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+]