Alfonso Cuaron is one of the best filmmakers working today, but I’ll be damned if I can make sense of his career. Since making his first feature-length film in 1991, Love in the Time of Hysteria (a movie he made in his native Mexico about a friendship between two suicidal people), Cuaron has made the G-rated A Little Princess, a modernized take on Great Expectations, the sexually charged Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the first watchable film of that franchise), the near future masterpiece Children of Men, the Oscar-winning outer space drama Gravity, and his most personal film, Roma about a poor family in Mexico City in the middle of that country’s “Dirty War” that started in the1960s and ended in the ‘80s. It is impossible to sort out Cuaron’s filmography other than to say that the man has a gift for versatility and excellence (Great Expectations being the only clinker in the bunch).
So, naturally, in his first major project since Roma in 2018, Cuaron has once again changed course and embraced a full-blown melodrama–one that Todd Haynes must be eating his heart out over–with Apple TV’s Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett. Apple has only made two of the first seven episodes available, but you only need to see those first two episodes to believe that this is the best take on a “beach read” since David Fincher brought Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl to the screen. Regarding genre, we are often told that pulp, horror, and melodrama are second-tier projects. Aside from the laziness of that perspective, if filmmakers as talented as Fincher, Haynes, or Cuaron leap into those spaces, they can prove that any type of film or series can be elevated. Disclaimer is elevated to the hilt.
Of course, any film or series starring the great Cate Blanchett is already ahead of the curve, but Cuaron does not ask Blanchett to carry all the weight here. Unsurprisingly, the show looks terrific. Working for the sixth time with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who teams with fellow DP Bruno Delbonnel), Cuaron makes every shot of Disclaimer purposeful, lush, sleek, and, when appropriate, grungy. Even the opening of a cutlery drawer is shot in a way that draws your attention to the anxiety surrounding the person reaching for the tines.
That anxious (and rightly so) person is the London-based Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an award-winning muckraking documentarian married to Robert, a high-level financial wizard (Sacha Baron Cohen) who adores but doesn’t fully know his wife. Their lives are about to be turned upside down by a broken-down school teacher named Stephen Brigstocke (the show doesn’t play around with last names). Catherine has a decades-long secret she’s been trying to keep, or as she later puts it, “forget.” The first two episodes of Disclaimer take place mainly during two time periods: in the past, when a callow young man vacations with his girlfriend in Italy, and the other in the present day when the events that took place during that trip return to haunt Catherine, her husband, and sure to be soon their son (an already resentful Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The young man’s name is Jonathan (Louis Partridge). He and his girlfriend first present themselves in Venice as whatever the British version of an “ugly American” is. When Jonathan’s companion suddenly has to return home, Jonathan is left in Italy to his own devices, one of which is a Nikon camera. The more Jonathan uses the camera, the more appealing he becomes. You see a barely adult young man shooting moments of beauty with curiosity, and it is genuinely endearing. At the end of episode one, as he is lying on the beach, looking out into the Mediterranean Sea, he sees a beautiful woman with a young child whose scant robe only enhances her bikini-clad form silhouetted against the bright sun. As Jonathan takes the Nikon and begins snapping shots of the woman, she turns and catches the eye of his camera and the young man photographing her. It’s an awkward “meet cute” that will lead to a torrid affair (thus far off-screen) and devastating consequences.
Kline’s Stephen and Blanchett’s Catherine separately discuss the death of a person of shared significance in the present: Stephen resignedly, Catherine with a desire for avoidance. The long-grieving widower Stephen leaves his position as an instructor (in unceremonious fashion) and begins to poke around his lonely house. As he does, he finds a manuscript for a novel and salacious photos that hearken back to when his life changed due to Catherine in ways far beyond what he previously knew. Much of the first two episodes show Stephen plotting his slow revenge against Catherine, but some remarkable sequences of living with grief allow Kline to do some of the best work of his esteemed career. Watching Stephen put on his wife’s pink cardigan and button up the ill-fitting sweater is a quiet moment of a man in steep decline whose only reason for being is to ruin the person he blames for destroying his life.
When Stephen’s plan takes action, it leads to a crushing scene between Catherine and her husband at the end of episode two. As Robert discovers Catherine’s darkest secret, the heretofore doting Robert unleashes on Catherine in an extraordinary tirade that is painfully authentic and full of emotional violence. As Robert, Sacha Baron Cohen is almost unrecognizable and gives the kind of revelatory performance that will forever change how one looks at the guy who made two Borat movies. Trading lines and keeping up with Blanchett can’t be the easiest thing an actor can ask of themselves, but Cohen more than holds his own.
Disclaimer uses a significant amount of voice-over by Kline himself and Indira Varma for Cate. While the detached narration style might not be to every viewer’s taste, what’s interesting about these inner voices is that the dry readings by Kline and Varma act as an outlet for Kline and a kind of defense for Catherine. Stephen is telling his story, his scheme, to the audience, but Catherine is far too harried to tell her own with so much to protect, and Stephen’s actions taking up so much room in her head. Varma is the voice of omniscience, Kline’s is the voice of action.
As the second episode closes with a shattered Catherine sobbing in the middle of the street, it is clear who has the upper hand at the beginning of this story.
Beware the man who has nothing left to lose.
Disclaimer is riveting television that feels more like the beginning of multiple chapters in what will be a five-hour and forty-three-minute film when the seventh and final episode closes. Thus far, there has not been a single wasted second. It’s too soon to think about what Cuaron might do next, but considering his track record, expect the unexpected. Until then, I suggest reveling in Disclaimer. It’s pretty damn good for a “beach read.”
The first two episodes of Disclaimer are available now on Apple TV, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Fridays
