At the climax of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma, a woman named Cleo walks into the sea until the waves reach her neck. Cleo doesn’t know how to swim, but she didn’t hesitate: she saw two of her subjects, young children from the family she works for, helpless in the water. When the trio returns to safety on the beach, her heroic act seems to allow her to acknowledge her relative lack of maternal feeling toward her recently stillborn child. The outing ends shortly thereafter, and Cleo’s duties resume once she enters the house. She is more beloved and indispensable than ever, but she is no longer part of the family.
“Roma,” which was based on Cuarón’s wealthy but unstable childhood in Mexico City, has been heralded as a masterpiece — the pinnacle of a career whose pinnacles include “Y Tu Mamá También,” “Children of Men,” and “Children of Men.” “. “Attraction.” What a crash landing then to get to his next series, the much-anticipated Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, written and directed entirely by Cuarón. The melodrama, which stars Cate Blanchett as a guilt-ridden mother confronts her relationship with a sinking Long Set in the Mediterranean is, at best, a curiosity: a startlingly hollow work by one of modern cinema’s most exciting auteurs, and a potentially feminist tale of sex and power that can’t help but feel a sense of ambiguous depravity – discoveries afoot. About Blanchett’s Katherine Ravenscroft, about the young man who drowned, about the mysterious figure who won’t let Katherine forget her small but crucial role in that death – and yet none of these details make the characters any more believable. The extent of the failure is baffling.
“Disclaimer” begins with Katherine, a well-known London TV documentary filmmaker, receiving a self-published novel in the mail. The strange thing is that she read it. And still an outsider, she recognizes herself in it, as a young woman vacationing on the Italian coast two decades ago with her four-year-old son. This conceit, taken from Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, was at first delightfully reactionary, then turned remarkably stupid. Sending the book titled “The Perfect Stranger” to Catherine is the first step in a byzantine revenge plot that depends on everyone in Catherine’s life also reading the unedited paperback. Preposterous stories should at least have the decency to be entertaining, but “Disclaimer” is consistently boring, stuffing the narrative merit of a seven-part miniseries with gratuitous relationships and scenes of debilitating sadness.
Catherine is presented as the archetypal unlikeable woman: she is unapologetically ambitious at work; She kept secrets from her evil husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), who called her a “beacon of truth”; She kicks her wayward twenty-year-old son, Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee), out of the home after years of struggling to communicate. If there is an irony to be extracted from the case of an investigative journalist trying to hide information that could ruin his reputation, the series does not succeed in doing so. Unlike 2022’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” “Disclaimer” aims to challenge how we measure female behavior, and our quickness to judge any actions that might deviate from the norm of self-sacrifice. But “Fleishman” was anchored in an upper-middle-class milieu, with particular shocks to its isolated location on the Upper East Side. By contrast, Cuarón’s script is simplistic and rootless, and Blanchett’s cold, aristocratic protagonist recalls only the actor’s layered performances in superior projects like “Tár” and “Mrs. America.” The strange, effectless third-person narration either describes the scenes we’re already watching or provides only the vaguest exposition. “Marriage is delicate. “Not just your marriage, but all your marriages,” Siri (Indira Varma) intones at one point, addressing Catherine. “And you think you’ve managed to stay on track.” Such explanations, which are meant to illuminate , making her plight less interesting than before.
“Disclaimer” jumps freely between past and present, spending almost as much time with Catherine’s tormentor — an elderly widower named Stephen, played by Kevin Kline — as it does with her. We learn in the pilot episode that “The Perfect Stranger” was written by his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), years ago, as a fictional story about the sudden death of their teenage son, Jonathan. Catherine, who appears in the novel and in a cache of erotic photographs of the boy, was believed by Nancy to be complicit in his drowning. After finding the manuscript, Stephen proceeds to destroy Catherine in turn. He stocked up on a hundred copies of the book, delivered duplicate copies of the photos to Robert, and spends much of his screen time pacing around in an ill-fitting, moth-eaten pink sweater that once belonged to his wife—behavior too cartoonish to describe. . So much about the devastating effects of loneliness and loss. Ultimately, he has all the dimensions of a slasher villain.
At times, the show offers flashes of what could have been. Early on, Christiane Amanpour gave a great presentation, presenting Katherine with an award for her journalistic achievements. In her opening remarks, Amanpour predicted what was to come, warning that criminals with seductive narratives can only manipulate us because we are eager to believe them. It’s a message that feels urgent in our age of streamlined reality – and one that’s easily lost, swept away by a tidal wave of debris. ♦
