‘Disclaimer’ Review: Cate Blanchett Is Riveting In Alfonso Cuarón’s Poetic & Prosaic Limited Series – Venice Film Festival
Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ limited series Disclaimer is gut-wrenching, beautiful and solidly conventional.
Based on the bestselling 2015 novel of the same name by Renée Knight, the seven-episode show written and directed by the two-time Oscar winner opens with a long shot of teenage sex on a European train and a warning. A Christiane Amanpour-delivered warning to “beware of narrative and form” at a fictional Royal Television Society award ceremony for acclaimed documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft, played by Cate Blanchett.
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Intentionally full of the contradictions of its dark cupboard of secrets and lies, the dual opening of Disclaimer gives away all that is to follow, both with skill and a distinct lack of subtlety. In that sense, with a seemingly perfect life shattered, betrayal, human frailty, grief and a mysterious novel that cuts too close to home, the series is intentionally aware of what it is.
An unusual step into the world of the small screen by the Roma and Gravity filmmaker, Cuarón’s TV series both stays true to Knight’s book and rarely strays from rules of the thriller form that widely populate streamers and premium cable these days.
Beware of narrative and form, indeed.
Even if you never read Knight’s book, you know this story. Cognizant that the rules are no game, Disclaimer is a very well-crafted three-act drama of revenge, reveal and redemption, with some regrets.
Having debuted to a six-minute ovation after a screening of its first four episodes Thursday at the Venice Film Festival, Disclaimer is set to premiere on Apple TV+ on October 11 with the first two episodes. Subsequent episodes will drop weekly until November 15. Too intense psychologically for a binge, the weekly deployment of the series is well suited to Cuarón’s structure of each episode as a chapter.
Yet, overall, Disclaimer is a study in confession by a filmmaker for whom perspective is the ultimate deconstruction. If you are expecting a work of towering originality, Disclaimer will disappoint. However, if you want a compelling and disturbing story within a comfort zone of discomforting tropes, Apple TV+ has the follow-up for you to its Presumed Innocent revival.
Measured and almost medieval in its use of different narrators, via Blanchett, plus co-stars Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville, the ruse is who telling the truth as much as what truth they are telling. Beyond the prestige of Cuarón and his cinematic vision, that uncertainty is Disclaimer’s imperium.
At this point in her multi-Oscar-winning career, it is of little contention that Blanchett elevates everything she’s in – even this summer’s Borderlands, and certainly the already high-ranking Disclaimer. It should also be a truism that Disclaimer is one of the few times a gaggle of Oscar winners and nominees are together, and their performances individually reach up to some of their best ever.
Playing bereaved Brigstocke across the decades, Kline, for instance, delivers one of the most centered performances of his own Oscar-winning and varied career. As his now deceased and previously distant wife Nancy, the magnificent Manville’s presentation of loss on a multitude of levels is truly heartbreaking amidst other characters who can’t see or feel beyond their own noses. It is Nancy’s sense of loss that produces the toxic ‘The Perfect Stranger’ book that shows up in the mail at Catherine’s home on the night of the award ceremony to ruin her life. A book whose contents sets off the chain reaction of near unbridled retribution that is the show’s black-hole soul.
Against the sheer beauty and horror of sun-splashed Italian vacation spots, a derelict London and impersonal hospital wards that Cuarón employs with splays of color and varying distances become plot narrative unto themselves.
Still, it is the rot of resentment and traumas that chews away at Blanchett’s Catherine and Kline’s schoolteacher and father Stephen Brigstocke. A rot that runs deep in both of them as the real story of each side of their respective stories tell more and more of how the teacher’s son died drowning more than 20 years ago plays out and unveil the events that led to that seaside day.
In fact, children, with Enola Holmes vet Louis Partridge as the now dead Jonathan Brigstocke, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Catherine and her Sacha Baron-Cohen portrayed lawyer husband’s drug-addicted son Nicolas, are the deep stakes in Disclaimer. Honoring Cuarón’s expressed wish to critics to not ruin the peeling away of plot and purpose in Disclaimer, let’s just say, the blindness of parents to who their children really are almost turns all the dimming light of Disclaimer to pitch black.
In that, allow me one spoiler of sorts: In Cuarón’s Disclaimer, no one but the viewer gets the indemnification they desire. Which is exactly as it should be.
Title: Disclaimer
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition/TV)
Distributor: Apple TV+
Release date: October 11, 2024 (streaming)
Director-writer: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Hoyeon, Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Partidge, Leila George
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