‘Disclaimer’ Review: The Stars Aren't Shining on Alfonso Cuarón’s Glossy TV Show
I’m trying to work out exactly when Disclaimer, the new star-studded Apple TV+ series directed by Alfonso Cuarón, came off the rails for me. Rewatching the first episode, I think it was actually pretty early – 90 seconds or so – when two young lovers, Jonathan and Sasha, played by Louis Partridge and Liv Hill, are enjoying some postcoital badinage on an Italian sleeper train. Jonathan is apologising for, shall we say, reaching the terminus too early, because he found the whole train thing too exciting, and wonders if Sasha felt the same. Sasha chides him: “Yeah, like I shag every time I take the Piccadilly Line. Riding between Oxford Circus and Bond Street makes me really horny.”
Uh oh. Oxford Circus and Bond Street? Piccadilly Line?! For the love of Bow Bells! Every Londoner worth his or her pearly-buttoned ensemble knows that’s the Central Line. Cuarón is Mexican, so fine, but didn’t a script editor have even a cursory glance? It was a worrying sign, and I’ll admit that I struggled to come back from it, not helped by Sasha’s pathologically frequent references to her “knickers” (cute? Sexy? Not to me!). But then I remembered the cast and creatives. This was Oscar-winning Cuarón! With Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett and Oscar-winning Kevin Kline still to come! It was surely an opening hiccup.
Disclosure isn’t, in fact, about Jonathan and Sasha at all. Well, it isn’t about Sasha, who gets shipped back off to England (her aunt, can you believe it, has had a terrible accident!) but it is a bit about Jonathan, whom, we learn, we are seeing only in flashback. For Jonathan is no more, having come to harm in Italy in a manner to which, in the first few episodes, we are not yet privy. What we do know is that his grieving father, Stephen Brigstocke – played by Kline – has the blame firmly pinned on a glamorous TV journalist, Catherine Ravenscroft, played by Blanchett, with whom, on that fateful trip to Italy, Jonathan became carnally acquainted.
Years later, Catherine is living a life of despicable comfort in an enormous, beautiful London townhouse with her oleaginous, wine-swilling husband, Robert (Sacha Baron-Cohen), and an unruly cat. She works in a post-industrial office space full of pot plants and has just won a National Television Society outstanding achievement award for being “a beacon of truth”. There are signs of trouble in paradise – her grown-up son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, seems to hate her – but things really start to unravel when a mysterious book arrives in the post. Entitled The Perfect Stranger, and with the troubling graphic design of self-publication, Catherine nonetheless reads it immediately and is horrified to learn that it recounts, in uncanny detail, her past sins.
You might wonder who has sent Catherine the book, but not really, because for a show that purports to be a psychological thriller – based on the debut by Renée Knight – there’s not a huge amount about it that’s mysterious. For yes, it is Stephen who’s written the book, based on a manuscript he discovered at the back of a desk drawer, left there by his late wife Nancy. Now that his son and wife are dead (Nancy due to terminal illness), Stephen is circulating it among Catherine’s nearest and dearest in order to have his revenge.
If we couldn't already guess why he’s doing it from the context – which we could – it’s made explicitly clear by a voiceover from Stephen that tells us: “I was the one who was going to destroy her real life; but first she had to suffer, like Nancy and I did.” We also know how Catherine feels about things, although her voiceovers are, for reasons that perhaps become apparent, in the second person, sometimes third. We even get a glimpse into the mind of the deeply unlikeable Robert, to whom Stephen sends racy pictures of Catherine taken by Jonathan, which shows her “enjoying pleasure with absolute abandon” in ways that Robert has never managed.
On paper, Disclaimer seems all but unmissable. It’s beautiful to look at, is full of atmosphere, and has all the trappings – and scenes set in enviable, marble-topped kitchens – that are indicative of prestige TV. (It can filed snuggly next to Big Little Lies, The Undoing, The Perfect Couple, and pretty much anything else Nicole Kidman’s been in of late.) Kline and Blanchett are, of course, a pleasure to watch – as, later, is Lesley Manville, even though she is inexplicably dressed like she’s in the 1950s. (Not all of their co-stars, it must be said, display quite the same dramatic skills.)
The problem, though, is that despite the sumptuousness of the visuals and the mood, the script and the story are at times alarmingly basic. “I had my ammunition; I just needed to throw the grenade,” says Kline’s Stephen, later mimicking an explosion with his hands, in case we weren’t sure what he meant. In another scene, when he’s pondering his plans to snare Catherine, he catches a cockroach in a glass. Hmm, wonder what all that’s about.
But what do we still want to know? Well, maybe what exactly happened to Jonathan, and how his interactions with Catherine (played in the flashback scenes by Leila George) came to pass? We do come to understand – at least in the hazy flashbacks we’re shown, though it’s not clear whose memories these are – that they met by chance on an Italian beach. Jonathan is so bewitched by this commanding older woman that every time he speaks or looks at her he appears to be on the verge of reaching the terminus too early, in his pants.
Catherine meanwhile, bored and beautiful and with a young son in tow (hubby Robert – great guy – has gone back to England to launder money for his family business, which poses as an umbrella organisation for NGOs), enjoys that attentions of this pretty new plaything. Episode three contains an extraordinary extended flirtation between the pair – in which Catherine asks Jonathan to detail his fantasies about Kylie Minogue – that is both excruciating and completely incredible, like Lloyd Christmas’s sex-dream in Dumb and Dumber.
At which point, I confess, my journey with Disclaimer, like Jonathan and Sasha’s train tryst, came to a premature end. The starriness wasn’t enough; the story wasn’t enough; the exquisite soft furnishings of the Ravenscroft mansion were not enough. Of course, yes, there are two sides to every story, and no doubt there are at least couple to this one, but to sustain an seven-part series we need to care where at least one of them is going.
Disclaimer launches on 11 October on Apple TV+
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