The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 8, review – a killer resolution is all this series needs
It all comes down to the sins of the father. That’s what the penultimate episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC Two) seemed to suggest regarding Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan.
The series started with Cunanan (Darren Criss) gunning down the designer on the steps of his Miami mansion in 1997. Over eight stately but gruesome episodes we tracked back through Cunanan’s life (and to a lesser extent Versace’s) and the string of earlier murders he committed. To the point where, this week, we finally arrived at the origin story.
We met Gianni (as a boy in 1957, encouraged by his dressmaker mother to be a designer even if that meant being called “pervert” by his teacher and “pansy” by his six-year-old classmates. (The dialogue had all the subtlety of one of Cunanan’s speciality hammer blows to the head.) But attention soon turned back to the killer and how he, too, had been an intelligent child with an effeminate streak; the spoilt favourite not of a saintly Italian mamma but of an obsessive Filipino immigrant father – Modesto “Pete” Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones) – who made the mistake of believing he could make it in America and got pulped.
As critiques of the American dream go, Modesto’s story – for all its flag worship and materialism – was not the most convincing. Because this particular member of the huddled masses was also a wife-beating delusional fraudster who robbed grannies of their life savings to send Andrew to a top-flight school. And who may, as one scene suggested briefly before fading to black, have sexually abused him.
In the climactic scene Andrew confronted Modesto, who had fled to Manilla to evade the FBI, only to be spat on and humiliated for being a “sissy” by the father who’d always purported to adore him. Well, it’s no wonder Andrew became a serial killer, appeared to be suggestion. But, as we know, plenty of people have been through a lot worse than that and avoided taking up killing as a hobby.
With just one more episode to go there’s still no knowing whether this American Crime Story will yet pull a dramatically satisfying resolution out of the bag. Let’s hope it won’t leave us feeling all we’ve done is spend too many hours in the company of a vicious multiple-murderer whose motives will never be fully pinned down.
