Between them, Cate Blanchett and Alfonso Cuarón are responsible for two of the finest moments of early 21st-century cinema. Blanchett famously delivered the opening voiceover to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – an information-dump of Middle-earth lore that should have landed like a wet weekend at a Tolkien convention but into which she invested a magisterial spookiness (“but they were all of them deceived, for another ring was made”).
Cuarón, for his part, gave us Children of Men, a dystopian portrayal of a world grappling with a refugee crisis, plunging fertility rates and far right politics that, over the years, has been revealed less as science fiction than premonition. It is one of the greatest films of the past quarter century – and a disturbing flash-forward to a future that may yet be steaming down the tracks.
With that record, Disclaimer – a seven-part Apple prestige drama starring Blanchett and written and directed by Cuarón – should be a slam-dunk for the ages. What a disappointment, then, that Blanchett’s intense acting style and Cuarón‘s auteur touch prove wildly unsuited to the demands of the binge-watch era.
Squandering talents assembled behind and in front of the camera, Disclaimer (Apple TV+ from Friday) is pretentious and indulgent – full of hateful, pathetic characters and besotted with the conceit of the unreliable narrator. Yes, it’s beautifully shot, and Blanchett is as committed as ever – yet this glib, preening miniseries soon collapses into self-importance.
Blanchett is Catherine Ravenscroft, a successful London documentarian with a dim toff husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and a grumpy Gen Z son from whom she is quietly estranged. She has a picture-postcard life: a vast kitchen, huge wine glasses, lovely clothes. But then she receives in the post a novel that reads like a thinly veiled account of a holiday fling she had in Italy 20 years previously (when dimbo hubby Robert was back in Blighty).
Cuarón cuts back to the affair, with Leila George (daughter of Greta Scaachi) playing the younger Catherine as a posh seductress who reels in the clownish Jonathan (Louis Partridge). While her lover is supposed to be wet behind the ears, Partridge (at the director’s behest, presumably) goes over the top and plays him as an idiot man-baby. It’s a miracle he made it to Italy without parental oversight, let alone managed to climb into bed with Catherine.
The damning book that has just fallen through her letterbox was written by Jonathan’s mother (Lesley Manville) after tragedy befell him on that same holiday. She has now passed away, but her husband, Stephen (Kevin Kline), is carrying on the resentment she nurtured against her son’s older love interest. It is he who sent the novel to Catherine, and that’s just the first step in a campaign of revenge that will have life-changing consequences for both.
Disclaimer is adapted from the 2015 novel by Renée Knight, and its natural hinterland is that of the cheesy thriller. There’s a throwaway Netflix version of this story – potentially with Nicole Kidman in the Blanchett part – that would have made for a rip-roaring romp.
But Cuarón and Blanchett have no interest in cheap thrills and instead attempt to bludgeon the viewer into submission with po-faced dialogue and annoying art-house touches – such as a constant cut to wild animals (a fox outside Robert’s house, a bug in Stephen’s kitchen). The director is presumably trying to make a wider point about the tooth-and-law nature of human relationships. Alas, the true takeaway from this silly series is to keep avant-garde directors out of reach of soapy potboilers.
