Alfonso Cuarón (Roma, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Gravity, Great Expectations) has mastered the art of filmmaking time and time again, but his latest work, a seven-part television series for Apple TV+, sees him step into a new realm, and claim it, accompanied by a stellar cast and crew.
This article contains spoilers for the series Disclaimer.
Adapted from Renée Knight’s novel into an almost six-hour series, “Disclaimer,” is grippingly captured by co-cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, The Revenant, Gravity) and Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour, Amélie, The Tragedy of Macbeth) and follows two families whose lives are mysteriously entangled.
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) audiences were treated to three episodes of Cuarón’s steadily paced adaptation at its North American premiere, which track the plot’s meandering narratives and shifting time frames with finesse and clarity.
“Disclaimer” casts two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Ocean’s 8, Don’t Look Up) as the lead, who gracefully takes on the role of Catherine Ravenscroft, a polished journalist and documentarian revered for exhuming the ugliest parts of her subject’s lives.
Whether audiences will view Ravenscroft as awful or gravely misunderstood is yet to be seen, but one thing is certain, her guiltless relishing in the luxuries of her upper-middle class life serve as a stark reminder of how privilege, in the minds of the privileged, absolves them from punishment.
But, off the back of winning a prestigious accolade, Ravenscroft’s life abruptly spirals into a frenzied crisis fuelled by an old encounter with the 19-year-old son of Stephen Brigstocke; a disillusioned widower and school teacher at the tail end of his career, who is played with humour and profundity by a brilliantly cast Kevin Kline (Sophie’s Choice,The Big Chill, A Fish Called Wanda).
Intent on curbing the impacts of a catastrophic fallout engineered by Brigstocke, Ravenscroft employs her investigative skills to smother her secret that drives him. Consumed by his insidious and stealthy tactics, she scrambles to keep her husband and son from filling in the blanks.
Ravenscroft’s doting, albeit slightly feeble spouse, Robert, played by Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Les Misérables, The Trail of the Chicago 7,) lives in her shadow. He is inwardly intimidated by the extent of her sexual experience and suspicious of her reasons for marrying him, but presents as overly supportive and comfortable in his role as a beneficiary of her far-reaching success.
As the plot thickens the protagonists become increasingly troubled and compelled by their own versions of the truth, which are spoken through an impactful and anonymous third-person narrator, who reveals the innermost musings of each character with mounting regularity and well-timed comic relief.
With the help of this atypical narrative device, Cuarón delves into the grubbiest nooks and crannies of each character’s psyche, adding depth and dimension to a sprawling and masterfully constructed story.
Strange visual cues forge a deeply unsettling tone. For example, Ravenscroft, when at home, is almost never in shot without her cat, who menacingly and repeatedly claws its way into her path. Animals are famously tuned in to human emotion, perhaps the cat’s incessant invasion of her space is its way of telling her it knows what she’s hiding.
The series is a curiously fashioned thriller that plays with narrative form and is peppered with dark humour, as well as examinations of people’s tendency to make ill-informed, emotionally-charged judgments, dodge accountability and manipulate circumstances in the interests of personal gain.
“Disclaimer” also stars Louis Partridge, Leila George, Lesley Manville and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
