Cuarón’s Messy Disclaimer Mostly Conveys The Power Of The Pen

Over the years, Alfonso Cuarón has built quite a name for himself, wracking up Oscar wins and critical praise through delivering a filmography defined by a distinctive visual style. His movies tend to catch the eye, whether it’s Gravity’s gripping space station survivalism or Children of Men and its oner so good it unleashed a wave of (mostly lesser) imitators. Even when the stakes are more grounded, like in the thoughtful Roma, he gets at the heart of quotidian problems through careful lingering observation, capturing moments of fleeting humanity that persist despite grim backdrops.

But before Cuarón was the man behind the camera, he cut his teeth on the small screen, a place he’s finally returning with his latest, Disclaimer, a seven-part Apple TV+ miniseries. Based on the novel of the same name by Renée Knight, Cuarón’s persuasive framing and compositions take us on a grim downward spiral juxtaposed against an idyllic snapshot of the past, the contrast between the two becoming increasingly apparent as things wear on. But as these circumstances heighten, doubts begin to creep in about whether these seductive images are being weaponized against us for some grander purpose.

The story follows Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), an award-winning documentarian and journalist whose life is in perfect order. She has a rewarding career, a nice house, and a doting husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen). While she’s not on the best terms with her son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), things are generally going swimmingly. That is, until one day, she receives a book in the mail that vividly describes parts of her life she desperately wants to keep hidden. The manipulator behind this stunt, a retired school teacher named Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), is a grieving elderly man who blames Catherine for what happened to his family and will stop at nothing to ruin her. Our protagonist attempts to protect the life she’s carefully constructed as everything around her falls to pieces.

While that description makes this sound like a rip-roaring psychological thriller, in reality, this series is less interested in constant plot twists and seat-of-your-pants tension than ruminating on the sometimes frightening power of the stories we tell. “Beware of narrative and form,” we’re told by an orator in the very first scene, and as the plot unfolds across multiple time frames and perspectives, we begin to intuit that some of these narrators may not be particularly reliable. Cuarón weaponizes the camera to deceive, framing a love affair with the steamy sensuality of a bodice-ripping romance novel, as an Italian sun wreathes Catherine in angelic light. While not as ostentatious from moment to moment as his films, there are still plenty of memorable sequences, including menacing tracking shots, clever natural wipes, and plenty of interesting, layered frames, many of which are more readily deployed in this stylized recollection.

Then, in the present, gray color grading paints English street corners in a near-perpetual state of gloom, which matches the mood of Catherine’s difficult-to-watch tailspan. These scenes are frequently dismal, and I don’t doubt many viewers will fall off the wagon due to the non-stop procession of misery that’s thrown our protagonist’s way, something that feels borderline mean-spirited and fairly repetitive in spots in a way that I wouldn’t usually associate with Cuarón, who wrote and directed every episode of the show.

As this book invades every corner of Catherine’s life, she’s subjected to non-stop humiliation and emotional torture for a past event that remains obscured. While these sequences are undoubtedly frustrating on purpose, it often feels like they would work dramatically better in the compact confines of a film where much of this suffering would be concise instead of stretched out over weeks of airtime. Meanwhile, these episodes fall prey to the classic contemporary small-screen issue of coming across more like slices of a several-hour-long movie rather than delivering satisfying, self-contained episodes of a TV show.

It also doesn’t help that as Brigstocke’s book turns everyone against Catherine with a near-preternatural power, the supporting characters become increasingly one-note—her husband’s underlying fear of emasculation becomes entirely empowering, while her son is insufferably aloof. The novel’s words influence characters in a cartoonish way, and while there’s a narrative purpose for this, the reveal comes at the very end, making much of the middle stretch difficult to sit through. Cuarón may visually demonstrate how story framing can influence the audience, but he fails to capture how we filter these incoming messages through existing biases and beliefs, which makes some of these reactions feel overblown. Moreover, I’m not sure if the things we see are supposed to actually be convincing versus if they’re supposed to demonstrate what a biased portrayal looks like—the stylization differences make it clear from the jump that these stories are being told by people who seem to have different motives.

But while these characters frequently lack nuance, thankfully, these performances fill in the gaps. Cate Blanchett captures Catherine’s increasingly suffocated desperation, while Kodi Smit-McPhee’s portrayal of her son, Nicholas, is pure impetuous despondency. But the best of the bunch is Keven Kline as the increasingly nefarious Brigstocke. This seemingly harmless old man weaponizes preconceptions about his age to manipulate those around him, and Kline perfectly keys into his constant mannerism shifts and vocal tics aimed at deceiving as he hits every beat with aplomb: grief, revenge, and gleeful spite.

And then there’s the last episode, which I won’t spoil, that recontextualizes the entire series and crystalizes what this story is “about,” for good and bad. On the one hand, it hammers home these reflections on how fiction can shape perceptions of truth, as it becomes fully clear how much Cuarón used his filmmaking prowess to attempt to put us in a certain state of mind about these characters—or at least to show some people’s version of “truth.” In the end, it builds towards a surprisingly tender final few moments that tie the narrative together, as it drives home how women are far too often discredited and disbelieved.

On the other hand, though, this episode also contains a stomach-churning scene of sexual violence that doesn’t have enough room to breathe in the story, crammed in at the end to hammer home how we should be wary of narrative and form. This horrible event is reduced to a plot twist in a way that comes across as tacky, an “aha” moment at the end of a mystery instead of something we probably should have had to sit with earlier.

Altogether, this choppy finale sums up Disclaimer’s messiness, a series that’s sometimes tedious and sometimes arresting. Many of the performances, especially Kline’s, are great, and Cuarón’s direction is sharp, visually conveying the potential persuasive power of fiction and how it can be used to emotionally exploit, even if the script can’t always keep up. While it would have likely worked better as a film or smaller miniseries to minimize the repetition of its middle episodes, even its gray, droll segments have some merit, capturing the horror of a life falling to pieces. Altogether, it relatively convincingly drives at its central thesis: you shouldn’t always believe what you see on TV.

Disclaimer premieres Friday, October 11th on Apple TV+.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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