Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“Beware of narrative and form,” Christiane Amanpour (presumptively playing herself) warns a gala dinner honoring Cate Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft in Disclaimer. “Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” Across seven episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ limited series, the two-time Oscar winner for Best Director has plenty of runway to deploy a variety of cinematic techniques and trickeries. But it does not take long for the two favored tools in his aesthetic arsenal to emerge, and they serve disparate purposes.
The first is an iris effect (think the James Bond opening credits gun-barrel vision) that narrows the aperture of the camera to isolate a specific portion of the image. The second is the use of deep-focus photography, which ensures every inch of the frame is rendered in clear detail. One forces the viewer to look at something, while the other gives them the freedom to decide if a background happening holds more intrigue than the action in the foreground.
Cuarón’s two-pronged visual strategy might be a noble and democratic approach in philosophy. In a loose sense, it mirrors the dual timelines to which Disclaimer tracks. In the first set in a sun-kissed 2001 Italian beach town, an impetuous British backpacker Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge) begins a dangerous dalliance with a new mother – a younger version of Catherine (Leila George) – after his girlfriend abandons their trip. It’s here where the iris effects are most prominent, training the viewer’s eye on the choices that will have long-term consequences.
In the second set in a chilly present-day London, their brief collision course has now become the subject of a best-selling novel written by Jonathan’s late mother Nancy (Lesley Manville), and published posthumously as well as pseudonymously by his father Stephen (Kevin Kline). The names are changed, but the story triggers such a visceral response in Catherine that it raises suspicions among her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and son Nicholas (Kodi Smith-McPhee). In this contemporary setting, cinematographers Bruno Delbonnel and Emmanuel Lubezki compose vast frames with multiple planes of action that suggest a multitude of stories playing out at all times as they play out.
Cuarón’s confident, assured style means no maneuver to come off as ill-considered, but it’s confounding all the same and in keeping with the troubling trend toward prioritizing technology over humanity in his work. Since making Children of Men, a film literally about the reawakening of the human race, his work has felt largely lacking in humanity. Despite working from a Renee Knight novel of the same name that delves into thorny emotions like lust and vengeance, Disclaimer feels entirely antiseptic because Cuarón treats his actors as just another visual element in the frame to manipulate. It’s telling that even the show’s most sensual scene operates as an instruction manual to sex.
As with many literary adaptations in the post-Big Little Lies era, Cuarón could easily have turned Knight’s book into a feature film that ran two hours and change. The expanded latitude of a seven-part series turns the show into something of a stylistic sandbox for the ever-innovative director. If ever there were a show that called for a viewer’s full attention without the distraction of a second screen, it would be Disclaimer. But making one of the most cinematic television programs ever made comes at the expense of character detail and substantive story.
Television need not be a mere plot delivery system, nor should all a show’s characters need to fit arbitrary standards of “likability.” But when spending six hours with these figures in the privacy of one’s own home, there’s a higher standard for complexity – or, at the very least, a need for detailed shading in the portrayals. Disclaimer is too much time to spend with characters that the filmmaker regards with indifference at best and ignorance at worst.
Cuarón renders this tale of rage, regret, and retribution in broad strokes. He loses the thread on their interiority, outsourcing the conveyance of their feelings to long-winded internal monologues. There’s occasional complicating tension from Indira Varma’s omniscient narration, which makes intriguing use of shifting second-person language to directly align the audience with a specific character. The approach is too cerebral and calculated to do justice to a story about the messiness of people acting from their worst primal impulses to protect and conquer.
In a story that takes the ability of people to set their own narratives as a core subject, it’s odd to disempower the actors so thoroughly by overexplaining thoughts that someone as talented as Blanchett can express in just a glance. She’s left doing warmed-over reheats of better work in films like Tár and Notes on a Scandal as powerful women grappling with the role they play in their undoings. Blanchett gets absolutely nothing from her on-screen family to work with, either, as Sacha Baron Cohen overwroughtly chews the scenery and Kodi Smit-McPhee does his best to fade into it.
Kline shines brightest in the present-day storyline as the frustrated family man twisting the knife into the Ravenscrofts’ nest, but even his sublime spitefulness chafes against the straightjacket of Cuarón’s overwriting. They don’t feel like humans; they feel like characters. That might sound like a distinction without a difference, but it matters when they are meant to be real and the younger versions are supposed to be literary reconstructions.
Despite the star wattage assembled in the present-day storyline, it’s the flashbacks that give Disclaimer much-needed vitality. Emerging Gen Z icon Louis Partridge impresses by weaponizing his baby-faced idealism and innocence, and he gives himself over wholly to let others use that inherent sympathy as a blank slate for their projections. His Jonathan gets especially twisted around the little finger of Leila George’s young Catherine, who brings all the charismatic screen presence Blanchett cannot. Beyond just channeling the legendary actress, she gets to bring something seductive and startling that’s all her own.
But the show falters in part because it cannot successfully bridge the divide between these two timelines. There’s a loaded look of George’s that the camera locks in on during a pivot point in her journey. It’s the thorniest and most thrilling moment of the entire series because Cuarón lets her face speak for itself. But even accounting for the kinds of manipulations and distortions it aims to center, Disclaimer never manages to bridge the distance between the two versions of Catherine. The two performances feel entirely incongruous.
Rather than expressing the contradictions of human behavior, Cuarón simply feels daunted in trying to understand any of it. Disclaimer never reconciles the broadness of its scope with the lack of detail it’s so intent on highlighting. Perhaps it’s not only the audience that needed to heed the series’ warning about narrative and form after all.
Apple TV+ will premiere the first two episodes of Disclaimer on Friday, October 11 and release a new episode weekly until November 15.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.
