Five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Gravity, Roma) has written and directed one provocative and wildly melodramatic thriller with Disclaimer, based on the bestselling novel by Renée Knight. The series debuted at the Venice Film Festival and will premiere on Apple TV+ on October 11th with episodes dropping weekly into mid-November.
The less you know going into the 7-part series, the better, but the basic story offers award-winning journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett in another extraordinary performance) as the target of a revenge plot for alleged past sins. She receives a novel in the mail and is flummoxed as she recognizes herself as the main character in a narrative that exposes long-suppressed, horrific secrets. Catherine must figure out exactly who is attempting to destroy her life before her gullible and rather pathetic husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen, in a departure for him) and surly son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) find out. The series time travels, so we move around in non-linear fashion. It begins in Venice, 20-years earlier, where a younger Catherine (Lelia George) first meets an even younger guy, Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge). What happens next, I will not disclose.
Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville have significant roles, but I won’t detail them so as not to spoil any surprises. Suffice to say both give poignant and powerful performances.
Disclaimer is one of the more erotically-charged shows to drop in recent years, giving Fellow Travelers a run for its sexy money, albeit with relations between hets. I’m going to guess that the scenes between George and Partridge will become internet fodder for months, and Partridge will be a new social media sex symbol for women and gay men.
One of the potent themes explored in the series is how easy it is to make assumptions about people based on what we decide we want to believe. A very important notion considering the rush-to-judgment world we live in.
Cuarón enjoys mixing genres here and he pushes the melodrama a bit far, but it all comes together rather magnificently in the final episode thanks to Emmy-worthy work by Blanchett.
FYI: The disclaimer to Disclaimer is “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
Huh. And yikes.
Somehow had no idea that Cuarón was working on anything, much less with Blanchett. I'm going to try to avoid spoilers but I sure hope the lead character is closely related to Thurl Ravenscroft.