TV Review: "Disclaimer"

The prestige drama from Alfonso Cuarón boasts impressive directing and performances but is hampered by a deeply flawed and frustrating narrative.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the series ahead.

It will probably come as no surprise to any of you who are regular readers of this newsletter that I am a huge fan of Cate Blanchett. Ever since I saw her in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth–and, shortly thereafter, in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings–I fell under her spell. If I have one rule when it comes to popular culture, it’s this: if a movie or TV show has Blanchett in it, chances are that I’m going to watch it. 

One of her more compelling, and very frustrating, projects is the Apple TV+ series Disclaimer. Directed and written by Alfonso Cuarón and based on the novel by Renée Knight, it focuses on Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft, whose life as a successful and award-winning documentarian is turned upside-down after a strange book is delivered to her co-workers and family. As the series goes on, secrets about Catherine’s past are revealed as she falls further and further into the vengeful plot concocted by Kevin Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke, who sees Catherine as the architect of his son Jonathan’s drowning two decades earlier.

The series is, to be sure, meticulously crafted, as one would expect of a director of Cuarón’s reputation and caliber. It’s also a very brittle and bitter affair. This is not the kind of show that you watch if you want to feel better about the world or the people in it. Much of this can be ascribed to Kevin Kline, who feasts on his role Stephen Brigstocke, whose grief over losing his son and wife has driven him to a path of vengeance from which it is perilously difficult to escape. As the series goes on, he becomes ever more committed to his path of vengeance, sacrificing what little humanity–and viewer sympathy–he’d managed to gain over the course of the first several episodes. Though he might have all the complexity of a slasher villain (as one review put it), there’s still some pleasure to be gained in watching Kline feast on such a juicy role. 

He is matched in this regard by his wife, Nancy, played by the inimitable Lesley Manville (who is, it must be said, having quite the career in television this year). Nancy takes Jonathan’s death even harder than her husband and, dealt a further blow by a cancer diagnosis, commits herself to preserving Jonathan’s memory and writing a novel she believes will expose the woman complicit in his drowning. She ends up becoming a sort of Mrs. Havisham, immured in her dead son’s room, surrounded by her own dying body and her thirst for vengeance.

And then there’s Blanchett herself. 

For all that she often excels at playing strong independent women like Elizabeth I and Galadriel, Blanchett is often at her very best when she’s playing women whose lives begin to unravel around them, despite their increasingly frantic efforts to arrest or stop the downfall. Much like Lydia Tár (or, for that matter, Phyllis Schlafly, anther of Blanchett’s great roles), Catherine Ravenscroft is a woman at the top of her career and her power whose entire life edifice is brought crashing down into ruin by both the consequences of her own actions and those who are very willing to destroy her for their own reasons. Catherine is without a doubt a flawed character, but Blanchett never shies away from letting us see the raw humanity beneath her increasingly frayed exterior. 

As finely-crafted as it is, and as strong as its central actors are in their performances, Disclaimer is hamstrung by some baffling story choices and a final episode whose reveal and emotional gut-punches feel both unearned and forced. For, it turns out, Catherine did not pursue an illicit affair with the much-younger Jonathan, only to leave him to drown after rescuing her son from the ocean, the plot of the book that Stephen sends to everyone in her environs, believing that everyone will see Catherine in its pages. Instead, he followed her back to her room after sharing a suggestive glance at their hotel and, once he cornered her in her room, he violently raped her. Catherine, overwhelmed by shame and horror at what had happened, didn’t tell anyone, until she tells Stephen the truth in an effort to get him to leave her and her family alone. For his part, Stephen finally realizes in a flash how wrong he’s been all along and how his unwillingness to admit the darkness and depravity he saw in his son led to his ever-escalating series of tragedies. 

While undoubtedly devastating, the finale just has too many plot conveniences and contrivances–and leans far too much on telling rather than showing–for them to be either emotionally impactful or narratively coherent. All of these story beats would have landed much more effectively had the series given us any indication that Jonathan was in fact the monster that he is shown to be. Instead, most of the action of the first six episodes has been largely an adaptation of Nancy’s pulpy novel, which she constructed based on some sexy photographs Jonathan forced Catherine to take at knife-point and a great deal of speculation. Other than a few hints dropped here and there–including a tense phone call between Nancy and Jonathan’s girlfriend’s mother–we as viewers are given no indication of the truth. As a result, it’s hard to really buy into the reveal at the end, for all that the series seems to think that this answers all of our questions. Instead, like so many other clumsy plot twists in recent TV storytelling, it ends up obscuring more than it reveals. 

When I first started watching Disclaimer I couldn’t shake the sense that this seven-episode miniseries would have been better as a feature, one that was tightly-woven and tense, perhaps akin to Notes on a Scandal (in which Blanchett also plays a woman whose life is turned upside-down by a sex scandal and a very bitter and angry old woman). After I finished the final episode, however, I came to agree with my partner, who thought that in fact it would have been a stronger show if it had had, say, a standard ten seasons to further develop these characters, their motivations, and the fraught relationship between the past and the present. 

Ultimately, while there were many things that I enjoyed about this series–particularly the performances, even Indira Varma’s strange narration that periodically overlays the action–I ultimately emerged very frustrated. Disclaimer has all of the markers of a prestige drama with things to say about such weighty issues as grief, revenge, cancel culture and the like. Unfortunately, it lacks the narrative coherence and discipline to handle any of these issues effectively, leaving the viewer as frustrated as its characters. 

Hopefully, Cuarón’s next TV project will be better.