Disclaimer Is a Flaccid, Pretentious Slog
No television series should be a seven-hour film. (Or eight, or ten.) This has been a recurring point of discussion over the years as the TV business labored through concepts of prestige imported from cinema, luxuriating in the excesses of its “golden era” and, later, Peak TV. Now that the biz has settled into a period of austerity, recent trends indicate a rediscovery of certain lessons from the grand old days of television: things like how it should be pleasurable and how each episode should end in a way that makes you want to watch the next. But every once in a while, a vestige of the high-streaming era emerges as a reminder of what happens when we forget these lessons. Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer is one such artifact.
A product of Cuarón’s deal with Apple TV+ announced in 2019, back when the streamer was all potential and big promises, Disclaimer is the revered Mexican filmmaker’s first excursion into serialized storytelling. He writes and directs all seven episodes, which revolve around the dueling fates of two British families linked by a disproportionate tragedy. On one side, there is Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), a celebrated documentarian married to boring, rich, but insecure Robert (an alarmingly straightforward Sacha Baron Cohen) and mother to Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the dirtbag son who barely tolerates her existence. On the other stands Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), a bitter old man practically waiting to die after losing his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), when he discovers a novel she secretly wrote about their son, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), who drowned years ago at the same Italian beach where the Ravenscrofts were then vacationing.
Disclaimer hold its cards fairly close to the vest regarding what actually happened between these characters on that fateful day, but we get the sense from the jump that it involved an intimate encounter between Jonathan and the much older, very married Catherine (played in flashbacks by Leila George, who has the misfortune of looking nothing like Blanchett). Much of how Disclaimer metes out this mystery takes the form of what are revealed to be scenes from Nancy’s novel, ultimately imagined interpretations of the day’s events. Whether these scenes reflect the “truth” is part of the series’ game, and that ambiguity becomes a point of conflict as Stephen gets the novel published and uses it to haunt Catherine in the present.
Cuarón adapts Disclaimer from Renée Knight’s best-selling 2015 novel of the same name, and its roots are firmly literalized by the director’s choice to rotate between three points of view: Stephen’s, Catherine’s, and a voice of God speaking in the second person (Indira Varma) to represent the perspective of Nancy’s novel. It’s clear what this device is supposed to accomplish: Disclaimer is a “family with a secret” drama by way of Rashomon, and its events are meant to coalesce into a sordid tale of the stories we tell about ourselves and the ones we love and how those stories stand in the way of truth and “objective reality.”
This is all high-minded stuff, but in how Disclaimer pursues these ideas and where the story eventually goes, the show never achieves liftoff. Even in the realm of dramatic television, the territory of the unreliable narrator has been well explored in anything from The Undoing to Sharp Objects. Disclaimer has the distinction of being about the moral unreliability of narratives shaped by the people doing the telling, but it never finds a surprising or even interesting idea of what that tangibly means. The series also doesn’t follow through on any other thematic threads it shows flashes of interest in. There are dashes of class criticism mixed into the proceedings, largely with the Ravenscroft family, though nothing beyond light reference to Robert’s patrician background. There are bits about cancel culture in how Stephen makes Catherine fall from grace, but the action rarely yields any real insight; an illustration of the decontextualizing force of social media recalls a similar thread in the Blanchett-starring Tár.
Cuarón has regarded the series as a “seven-hour film,” and perhaps his approach would have worked better if the production were designed to be experienced in one sitting. In its current form, the whole thing just slogs on. Scenes play out with all the portent of a Catholic Mass. Some sequences go so long you start to wonder if they’re padding the run time. An early episode features a sex scene so drawn out it crumbles into absurdity; there’s only so much titillation such a sequence can hold before you start wondering about the point of it all. A late endgame race to a hospital plays out so languorously it’s impossible to understand how it came from the very same person who made Children of Men. It is truly hard to care about anything or anyone, mostly because the show doesn’t seem as though it wants you to, especially when its characters are never made to question the logic of their actions or those of the people around them. Not Robert as he’s melting down over the discovery of being cuckolded long ago, not Catherine as she barely attempts to make amends with her family, not Stephen as he slouches through his vengeance despite suggestions that things may be different than they seem.
Disclaimer feels like a miscalculation. It could have made for a great David E. Kelley joint in the vein of his recent hit Presumed Innocent (also Apple TV+) or, better yet, another entry in Nicole Kidman’s growing canon of unimpeachably thrilling campy television. Instead, what you get is a thick layer of pretentiousness. The script is littered with excessively verbose turns of phrase: “The book was a work of fiction, but it released the truth from its ballast, allowing it to rise to the surface.” Cuarón’s signature visual style, which favors active, roving camerawork, frequently calls attention to the scenes’ placidity. Kline, whom we haven’t seen onscreen in a while, and Blanchett give interesting performances — the former as a geriatric angel of death, the latter as a haughty elite trying to hold her fragile life together — but they’re calibrated in outsize ways that feel incongruous within the general airlessness of the production.
The few traces of pleasure to be found in Disclaimer are typically incidental to the action. The Ravenscrofts occupy an outrageously opulent home complete with a kitchen that would make Architectural Digest sickos weep. Indeed, the entire show looks stunning, courtesy of the great Emmanuel Lubezki (a frequent Cuarón collaborator) and Bruno Delbonnel, cinematographers doing great work making a grim, dreary old London look morbidly attractive. Both the Ravenscroft and Brigstocke households also feature great cats, who seem so perfectly present and fun to watch they’re probably CGI.
But the actual meat of Disclaimer doesn’t ever fill you up. As the episodes roll on, it becomes increasingly hard to engage with the droll and repetitive way Brigstocke labors to destroy Ravenscroft. When the concluding stretch arrives, the final set of revelations includes ones you see coming from a mile away, but by then, you may be wondering why you stuck with it.
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