“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate,” says a seemingly omniscient and distractingly didactic female narrator as the camera closes up on our protagonist, Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), in the opening sequence of Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer. We assume that the overly explanatory and intrusive narration will be temporary: Cuarón even assures us of this by immediately cutting away from Catherine to reveal the woman to be a mere awards presenter, all but introducing our protagonist as a journalist and documentarian receiving an award for “cutting through” the façade of game-like-narratives and-formal manipulation to reveal the truth lying underneath it. However, more than halfway into the first episode of the seven-part miniseries, we realize that our relief (and his assurance) was temporary, for not one, but two narrators — one unreliable, the other seemingly omniscient — now constantly and awkwardly intrude upon the series’ drama. That’s, unfortunately, how most of Cuarón’s 343-minute-long project plays out. It’s an unnecessarily overelaborate and overlong adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel of the same name, so caught up in Rashōmon-style narrative and tonal flip-flopping and formal gimmickry (including some of the most annoyingly extraneous voiceovers used in any series or film in recent memory) that it’s unable and, perhaps more damningly, unwilling to cut through its own excess until the very last episode to make the point that the awards presenter made right at its beginning.
Now, narrative circuitousness, or even excessiveness, is not a problem in and of itself. The two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker (Best Director for Gravity in 2013 and for Roma in 2018) has repeatedly said in interviews that his intention with his first foray into television was to do something “overtly narrative.” In particular, he wanted to explore “how we perceive narrative and how we create our own narratives based on those narratives.” But does overcomplicating and intellectualizing a pulpy Gone Girl-like (and -lite) story — about a woman’s race against time to prevent her personal and professional life from falling apart after she discovers that she’s the main character in a book called The Perfect Stranger that claims to implicate and expose her illicit affair with a now-deceased young man whose identity she kept hidden from her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) — really work?
Cuarón certainly tries his best to make it so. He structures his Disclaimer as an interlocking network narrative, not unlike fellow Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s early work (Amores Perros, Babel) in order to neatly distribute the series’ narrative between Catherine and her blackmailer, Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), both of whom live their hermetically sealed lives in a miserably cold and rainy, bluish-grey London. He, then, adds another narrative layer to further complicate the drama: we regularly iris into and out of a sun-dappled Italy 20 years ago when a younger Catherine (Leila George) had her “holiday fuck” with the now-deceased Jonathan (Louis Partridge). Because this narrative — shot presumably by Cuarón’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki with a youthful abandon deliberately lacking in cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s staid work when capturing Stephen and Catherine’s lives — stands in such a stark contrast to the other two narratives that it feels most natural and resonant. It also lacks the incredibly off-putting first-person voiceover that dominates Stephen’s story and the second-person voiceover narration (flatly delivered by Indira Varma) that dominates Catherine’s, making it, again, feel most believable as an unbiased and truthful account of what happened in Italy, unperturbed by the disturbance of any voiceover.
It’s a neat little formal trick that manipulates us into believing this is the truest, or at least the most intriguing, narrative of them all. Unfortunately, however, it comes at the cost of any emotional or intellectual engagement with Catherine and Stephen’s stories. Constantly intercutting between the three stories throughout the seven episodes doesn’t help, for it always feels like Cuarón’s programmatic narrative machinations overwhelm his attempts at character introspection. (Episodes II and VI, which exclusively focus on Catherine’s fracturing relationship with her husband and already fractured relationship with her son, are far and away the most dramatically potent). But, worse still, when Cuarón prioritizes interiority, he does so by slapping on incessant voiceover narration (that sounds like leftover excerpts from Knight’s novel that Cuarón liked but didn’t know how to integrate into the show’s narrative naturally) to reveal exactly what his characters are thinking and feeling. Now, it’s somewhat understandable why he would choose to do so when the actor in question is Sacha Baron Cohen, whose performance as Catherine’s blank-faced, jealousy-stricken husband struggling to come to terms with his wife’s infidelity scans as an unconvincing impersonation of an already unconvincing Tom Cruise performance in Eyes Wide Shut. But to repeatedly employ that same technique when directing actors like Blanchett, Kline, and Lesley Manville (who, playing the dead Jonathan’s mother in flashbacks narrated by Kline, is really the only one who comes out of Disclaimer innocent) is, to put it kindly, a curious case study in self-sabotaging your own project. Neither time nor space is given to either of the actors to really convey their stoic vulnerability through their withering physicality; every moment of their expression is doubly expressed through voiceover that, sure, conveys what they’re saying or feeling but, but which also negates the feeling one gets from sensing that expression through their performance.
The vast majority of Disclaimer plays out at this detached distance. It gives us enough space and time to mull over its formal showmanship and puzzle narratives to piece together its central mystery two to three episodes before Catherine reveals it all in the final episode. Still, we hope there’s more to it than we think there is; we hope that Cuarón has some trick up his sleeve to twist the series’ already overpacked but undercooked narrative in a direction that complicates its exploration of female desire and sexuality. But, no — this is no Y Tu Mama También. If anything, Disclaimer’s resolution — featuring a drastically alternative POV of the section in Italy, now minus the playful iris-in-and-out scene transitions and complemented by Blanchett’s voiceover — plays out a bit like Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel minus the gladiatorial action. Its feminist triumph derives not from complicating our protagonist, but from reducing her to a saintly victim, silenced and subjugated by misogynist narratives created by all the men around her. Her desires — left unexplored by the myriad narratives running throughout the show — are also revealed not to be ambiguous at all. It’s a bit overly simplistic and cheaply manipulative; in other words, the very things Disclaimer wants to critique but can’t help but also embody.
DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuarón; CAST: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi-Smith McPhee; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; STREAMING: October 7; RUNTIME: 5 hr. 43 min.
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