Poor Vera Farmiga presses it over her face and, as my TV’s closed captions had it, “breathes deeply.” She then tells Halston he is a born perfumer. Perhaps the most Murphy scene in “Halston” comes when the designer, asked to provide scent inspiration for a new perfume, blandly hands over his lover’s jockstrap. “Halston” emanates from a fashionably blasé place, a pose of indifference assumed throughout the attempt to shock.
It’s a story of its moment, but it’s a bit shocking to see its ideas resurface again so soon. There, gay men exist in a sort of unredeemed pain and crisis, loveless and loathing.
As Halston’s lover, Gian Franco Rodriguez fares better, but his role in the story - existing in Halston’s life at an icy remove even at the height of their affair, then working to exploit him after they disentangle - seems intended to serve themes of gay treachery and venality that, with “Boys in the Band,” Murphy has already sold us. And conjuring the magic and possibility of Studio 54 would be a heavy lift, but the show barely tries crucially, Rodriguez seems under-directed and uncertain in the key role of Minnelli, upsetting the power imbalance between the two and letting key scenes drift away. Flashbacks to Halston’s youth nod at the idea of the difficulty of growing up gay in midcentury middle America, but are so brief as to give the audience little of the real pre-notoriety Roy Halston Frowick to grab onto. There’s an uncertainty, a diffidence, to the way “Halston” is told that raises the question, as it unfolds, as to what story producers wanted to tell at all. It eventually just stops telling its story - cuing up onscreen titles explaining Halston’s death and what happened to the other famous figures we met - without having provided a real ending, or much of a beginning or middle, either. Having established that Halston is without love for reasons within society and within himself, too, the show just shrugs. This show doesn’t go that far, because it doesn’t let itself go anywhere. Previously, Ben Platt in “The Politician” and Darren Criss in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” played queer men driven by ambition that looks a lot like misdirected rage. Just last year, he produced a feature film remake of “The Boys in the Band,” the 1968 play that is the ultimate theatrical howl of isolation and pain. Certainly the notion that the modern history of gay life is one as colored by repression and self-loathing as much as by the power of expression is a rich vein throughout Murphy’s work.
#Halston episodes series#
This is not a new lane for Murphy, and once again it seems revolutionary - how rare to make an entire five-episode series dedicated to amplifying such a sour, cynical note - until one realizes there is nowhere for this story to go. That “Halston” the show similarly throws away real talent would be less frustrating if the show didn’t seem to be responding to its own shortfalls in real time.
Halston the man - at least according to the show bearing his name - was a creative powerhouse who, eventually, let his talent go largely wasted. And it hardly takes a Murphy obsessive to note the timing of a show about an artist whose creative life was ruined by attaching his name to products that didn’t represent the best use of his talents this arrives some years into a Netflix partnership that so far has borne series that are creatively wobbly at best. Producer Ryan Murphy never works alone - “Halston” was created by Sharr White, directed by Daniel Minahan, and produced by, among others, Christine Vachon (also an executive producer on the FX queer-history documentary series “Pride,” out the same day as “Halston” and engagingly big-hearted in ways the limited series never approaches). “You are not Halston anymore,” an intimate informs him, as the loss of his autonomy sinks in, suddenly and all at once. In the new Netflix limited series, also called “Halston,” we see, at first, Ewan McGregor’s gleeful realization at just how much money he can make stamping his name on inferior product later, he realizes the fees he’s collected came at the price of his artistic soul. Halston, the mononymous designer whose peak fame dovetailed with the celebrity whirl of Studio 54-era New York, rose thanks to his originality and coasted thanks to his willingness to be duplicated.
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