<i>The Assassination of Gianni Versace</i>'s Flawed Beauty
FX’s <em>American Crime Story</em> uses lavish detail to tell of an iconic designer’s murder—and what it said about society.
tries to test the viewer’s appetite for classical beauty. In long, slow, largely wordless sequences, Ryan Murphy’s camera pans over the ornate tiling of the Versace villa, over the sun-kissed pastel facades of ’90s Miami Beach, and over the speedo-clad bodies that inhabited both. The lens will swoop and dive through a cavernous club populated by shirtless men in angel wings, or it will hover, gnat-like, right up against Penélope Cruz’s face. Often, in these moments, the sound of opera
