Form trumps function in Alfonso Cuaron‘s new, star-studded limited series Disclaimer, a somewhat too obvious piece of narrative sleight of hand, in which the mechanics of the narrative are captivating and the narrative itself is largely perfunctory.
Of course, if you accept that the narrative of this adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel is entirely about how the mechanics of narrativizing can get in the way of the truth … well, the truth is that Disclaimer, driven by tricky and playful lead performances from Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, may be one of those shows that’s more fascinating to talk circles around than to actually watch. This is already what critics are going to have to do in order to review without spoiling anything.
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Disclaimer
Sound frustrating? Perhaps a little.
Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed documentarian with a blandly wealthy husband (Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Robert), a directionless son (Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Nicholas) and a name that reeks of the heightened gothic intrigue to come. Contemplating her next professional venture, Catherine receives an unsolicited copy of a thin book titled The Perfect Stranger. She starts reading. First, she’s gripped. Then she’s horrified. Then she’s standing at the sink trying to set the book on fire.
“I recognized myself,” she says. Literally. Catherine is certain that the book is about her, about a 20-year-old secret she hoped would be buried forever. “Something in that book made me hate myself all over again.”
Self-flagellation is only the beginning of what Stephen Brigstocke (Kline) has in mind for Catherine. A former teacher, Stephen has come to blame Catherine directly for the death of his son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and indirectly for the death of his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville), and he’s determined to make Catherine pay. For what, exactly?
Not the least bit coincidentally, the series begins with Catherine being praised for a body of work that “has cut through narratives and form that distract us from hidden truth.” Over seven episodes, in which Catherine’s occupation is thoroughly and perplexingly irrelevant, Disclaimer whips the audience into a frenzied desire for answers.
But as a narrator cautions, “Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.”
Disclaimer is, then, like one of those Penn & Teller magic tricks in which they tell you exactly what they’re doing and, if they spin their meta-yarn enthusiastically enough, you know you’re being manipulated and you’re still amazed. In the case of Disclaimer, mind you, I was much more aware and even compelled by the manipulation than I was amazed by the result.
I nebulously mentioned “a narrator,” because Disclaimer is, at various points, narrated in various styles by various people. Catherine, alone, steers the story in cagey second-person, somewhat smug third-person omniscient and then, when she’s prepared to reveal her truth — not THE truth, mind you — in an unpolished, unrehearsed confessional style, complete with ambient noise. Stephen’s voiceover alternates between self-satisfied candor and a performative malevolence that match Kline’s deliriously theatrical approach to his character; the seemingly withdrawn widower is rejuvenated by the opportunity for revenge, playing different roles with different body language and different cadences for each person he yolks into his ambitious plot.
The only person playing more roles and investing more thoroughly in this fabulism than Stephen is Cuaron, writer and director of every episode.
The visualized plot of The Perfect Stranger — in which virile young Jonathan travels Europe, having porn-y sex with his flamboyant girlfriend and then, on a beach in Italy, meets an older, wiser stranger (Leila George, burning up the screen) for a series of increasingly hot, increasingly precarious dalliances out of Penthouse Forum — is bathed in a hyper-saturated sunny glow, so artificial as to be breathtaking or suspicious. Some of the vignettes from the book — each introduced by the same iris-in and closed with the same iris-out — last only a minute or two, allowing the mystery to be dragged out and therefore giving the evasion of the pivotal sin shades of Scheherazade, that master of weaponized tale-telling.
Despite the artificiality of how we process The Perfect Stranger, everybody in the series is taking this roman à clef as truth, but why? Because there are also incriminating pictures? In our age in which AI has stripped the assumption of reality from photography, Disclaimer may be the last show in which snapshots are granted this power of veracity, which is surely Cuaron’s point as well.
The director, working with the astonishing cinematographic partnership of Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, spends much of the series expanding the limitations of the television frame. If a character is sitting near a window, you can guarantee both an impeccable silhouette in the foreground and that something will be happening outside the window in deep focus. If a television is in a room, the programming will not be an afterthought. If there’s noise from an adjoining room and/or a conversation at a nearby table, it will be audible and utilitarian to the mise en scène. Is Cuaron’s intent distraction or the careful training of viewers to pay attention to every aspect of the storyteller’s arsenal, regardless of medium? Yes and yes.
Adding nuance, even when the story spins its wheels, is the cast. Blanchett is icy and then brittle as Catherine’s life begins to crumble, supplying an aloofness that plays into different interpretations and judgments of her character. Cohen — worthy of recognition for never falling into a single “my wife” punchline — supplies the wishy-washy credulousness that any good story requires, that the audience is meant to emulate or critique. And Smit-McPhee is heartbreaking as a young man doomed to be a supporting player in other people’s tales. It’s a deep enough and good enough cast that it took me multiple episodes to even realize that Catherine’s assistant — assistant in who knows what, since her profession is only relevant to the theme and not the story — is played by HoYeon Jung, so wonderful in her Emmy nominated Squid Game role.
Like Kline’s performance, everything in Disclaimer is a little dazzling and a little silly. I found the experience of watching the series to be more of the former and the experience of reflecting back on the overall journey — and particularly whether it might have been better told at feature-length, more reflective of the actual volume of story — to be more of the latter.
