Disclaimer Review
In the first few minutes of Apple TV+’s new series “Disclaimer,” Christiane Amanpour describes one of our protagonists, renowned documentary journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), as being “wary of narrative and form.” “It has the enormous ability to manipulate, but it can also help us get closer to the truth.” As a classic of form, Alfonso Cuarón’s seven-part limited series for the streamer, which is based on Renee Knight’s 2015 novel, obviously aims to manipulate its narrative.
Its audience, not just its characters, is methodically revealing a twin-poled story of delicious retaliation and the joy with which we both participate in and observe it. It also becomes a magnificent tapestry crafted by one of our best directors, with A-list performers in front of and behind the camera, just like so many amazing Apple TV+ programs before it. However, too few people will undoubtedly watch it due to the location of its webcast.
When we first meet her, Ravenscroft is on top of the world: She has a fawning husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen, stone-faced and obsequious), a healthy, if unambitious and troubled son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and a robust career at the top of her field. But all that threatens to come crashing down when a book arrives on her doorstep: “The Perfect Stranger,” with a disclaimer Catherine treats with caution: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
The more she reads, the more she recognizes: the protagonist is her, recounting an unpleasant chapter twenty years prior, when she (Leila George) struck up an affair with a much younger man, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), while vacationing in Italy with Nicholas, then a toddler. We learn that Jonathan later died saving Nicholas’ life, which offered Catherine the perfect excuse to keep her dalliance a secret. Now, thanks to this book, her life and reputation can be humiliated.
And who’s responsible for such a tumultuous time? Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), an over-the-hill private school teacher and Jonathan’s father. Where Catherine’s life is one of glamour and prestige, his is a humble, run-down existence; his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville in flashbacks), passed some years prior, and he holes himself away from the world, lost in her remaining belongings alongside nude photos of Catherine that corroborate the story. Nancy wrote the manuscript, a supposition based on those photos and what she knows of events. Upon finding it in a faraway drawer, Stephen chooses to get it published—to punish the woman responsible for destroying his family.
Readers, be advised that “Disclaimer” is not a pleasant watch. The unmaking of a lady and the diabolical joy with which an enraged old man approaches it are shown in its seven chapters. Cuarón’s poetic narrative and tasteful directing play with preconceptions and expectations, luring you into one viewpoint before cutting to another. (On the visual level, there are echoes of the long-take gloom in the present-day sections of “Children of Men” and the warm, handheld sexuality of “Y tu mamá también” in its gauzy, soft-focus flashbacks to Italy;
cinematographers Bruno Delbonnel and Emmanuel Lubezki seemingly pass the visual baton between them.) It feels like watching a war being waged; with each new copy of Stephen’s book landing in the hands of a new friend, or loved one, or colleague, we see it land like a bomb in Catherine’s life. In response, she grows more and more defensive, unable to explain her crimes away, which only compounds her guilt in the eyes of her accusers. And then, we cut to Stephen, barely hiding a Cheshire cat grin as his trap closes more and more tightly.
Both Blanchett and Kline are superlative in their roles, orbiting each other as a binary star of white-hot resentment. Shades of “Tár” obviously abound with Blanchett, playing yet another powerful woman lashing out at her own unexpected cancellation. But Kline toys delicately with Stephen’s channeling of grief (his puttering around the house wearing Nancy’s moth-bitten pink cardigan, her favorite) into the “Oldboy”-like long game he wishes to play with Catherine.
It’s unrelenting and deliberately so; “Disclaimer” is a portrait of pain and the fingers we point when we need to direct that pain elsewhere. It also points the finger back at us, frankly, and the Stephen-like joy we and others can derive from seeing someone we deem lesser or bad get their just desserts. Sometimes, it posits, we may be all too happy to join the booing crowd, even (or especially) if it gives us the chance to take someone privileged down a peg.
But all this grimness can sometimes threaten to pull you under; there’s no lightness to really soften the blow, especially as it spirals towards its inevitable, table-turning conclusion. I can’t see much room for escape, apart from the steamy eroticism of the Italy flashbacks (filtered through the subjective narrative of the novel within a story), glimmers of an exciting fling whose impact ripples through decades of grief and secrets.
However, you won’t find solemnity on “Disclaimer,” nor does anyone come here seeking it. Instead, it’s a beautifully wrought tapestry of agony that catches you by the head and makes you look at the train wreck of two people’s lives as you’re trapped in the wave of suffering. The drowning will draw anyone nearby beneath the river in despair, and you will witness this in sharp, clear clarity. After all, it’s stated that you have to dig two graves before you can seek retribution,
