TV Review – Disclaimer

Disclaimer (2024)
Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron

Alfonso Cuaron is a filmmaker who has delivered some art that wowed me over the years. Children of Men is one of the best post-9/11 films to have come out. Watching it now feels prophetic as a study of social collapse in Western societies that cannot handle the refugees they created. His Harry Potter film is the only one with merit outside of being part of the franchise. I was slightly less impressed with Gravity, but Roma is a fairly good movie told from a privileged point of view. I don’t always love his work, and Disclaimer falls into that ambivalent category.

Told non-linearly, we follow the lives of two families living in London. Catherine (Cate Blanchett) is an award-winning documentarian who struggles to maintain her relationship with her adult son, Nicholas (Kodi Smitt-McPhee). Her world explodes when a package containing a newly published novel appears on her front step. It tells the story of a woman on vacation in Italy who has a steamy sexual encounter with a teenage boy while her husband is off attending to his business. The teenage boy ends up dying under questionable circumstances. The book was sent to Catherine by Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), a newly retired schoolteacher & widower who discovered the manuscript hidden by his late wife (Lesley Manville). He believes this is the story she pieced together of what happened to their son, and he holds Catherine responsible.

The performances here are strong across the board. My only exception would be the dreadful Sacha Baron-Cohen as Robert, Catherine’s husband. I’ve never found him to be that great of an actor; his fame is more about his character pranks. When you put him opposite Blanchett or Kline, the lack of skill definitely shows. Blanchett is, no surprise, wonderful, even if there are bits in the script that feel like they could have gone through a rewrite or two. Kline walks the line between a nuanced character and a mustache-twirling villain. The best acting in the series comes from the Italian flashback sections.

The flashbacks are led by Leila George as young Catherine and Louis Partridge as Jonathan. Because the unreliable narrator trope becomes a key part of the series, these actors get to play out two versions of their encounter, each with a drastically different tone. Early on in the mini-series, I noticed that the story we saw play out in flashbacks was actually excerpts from the novel Brigstocke’s wife wrote. She pens the tale based on some sparse details the police shared when they came to claim Jonathan’s body and a roll of film she developed that was in her son’s camera. A couple of episodes in, I remembered the title and how it was referenced in the first episode, as well as a note in the novel’s opening that these events are not based on real people.

The structure is where Cuaron has focused most of his energy. After a while, once I figured out the show would reveal a different version of past events, the structure felt less interesting. I was left with a host of unsympathetic characters in the present day and performances in the flashbacks that were much more interesting. Leila George gets to play such a sultry, seductive version of Catherine in the novel excerpts. I don’t typically find much non-pornographic media to be that sexually enticing. George plays this fictionalized version of Catherine perfectly; the version of Jonathan’s mother needs to be real so she can feel justified in her grief and anger. In the novel, Young Catherine is the exact thing that would seduce a young man, which is why this version of events feels hollow when you think about it. But I would argue that is what those dramatized novel excerpts should feel like.

The core element that left me cold to Disclaimer was the story choices in the latter half of the series. Some of these surround the dramatic reveal of what happened between Catherine and Jonathan, and they don’t feel completely earned. The show has a heightened sense of reality but then wants to suddenly get starkly honest in ways that clash with the rest of the atmosphere. There are so many contrivances and conveniences that play out in the last two episodes that Disclaimer dangerously walks the tightrope between melodrama and farce, and for some viewers, I wouldn’t be surprised if it fell off onto the latter side. I don’t think there are enough overt hints that the flashbacks we’ve seen are purely from the novel, so when the shocking reveal appears, I felt it clashed with the rest of the series while still making logical sense.

While watching the show, I kept thinking that this story would have been made into a decent 90-minute to two-hour feature film in the 2000s or 2010s. As an episodic mini-series, it doesn’t give you enough time to understand these characters and their motivations in the way we have come to expect serialized television to do. If it had been ten episodes rather than the odd seven, we might have gotten an episode that spotlighted a couple of characters and helped us connect with them better. There’s also an inconsistent voice-over narration provided by Indira Varma that the show never provides a reason for. 

I was left feeling disappointed at the end of all of this. It has all the hallmarks of prestige television, including the cast and writer/director. I think Cuaron lights the show and uses digital effects perfectly. There’s no arguing the technical merits of the show, but it fails to say anything of real meaning about grief or revenge. There’s some touching on “cancel culture,” but even that is something the show is incoherent about. Disclaimer ended up being a decent watch, but nothing I would come back to. Quite a letdown from Alfonso Cuaron, in my opinion.