Without revealing the skewering spoilers, there is little point in reviewing “Disclaimer” because one deprives the reader of the film’s raison d’être. Tell the spoilers, and there’s virtually no point to recommending this groundbreaking TV series, which the Wall Street Journal designates as “one of this season’s Top Ten.” Each critic is left to his or her own devices in sorting this dilemma. Hopefully one of those devices is a moral compass.
Suffice it to say that the dramaturgic, dramatic, and directorial undertaking that writer-director Alfonso Cuarón presents us with should win him a nomination as “TV Whisperer.” In the opening scene, we glimpse a professionally ambitious, now middle-aged woman Catherine (Cate Blanchett), being honored for her success in righting social wrongs. Something is karmically amiss in her demeanor as she accepts the award. In short order, a complex interface with an older couple of her own social class whom she has apparently wronged, becomes seductively and wrenchingly compelling in its exquisite if mystifying detail.
Catherine is by all accounts, except one–theirs, a proper upper middle class Englishwoman. In a flashback to her younger self (Leila George), we see her vacationing in Italy with her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their young son Nicholas. She is a mimetically attentive mother. Robert leaves her in Puglia, entrusting her with their son’s care, and returns to work in London.
While on the beach, Catherine observes a doleful-looking young man (Louis Partridge) with an expensive camera shooting photos of her. He follows the mother and son to the shoreline and they exchange brief greetings. His name is Jonathan and he’s from London, too.
Later that evening, while Nicholas sleeps in his bedroom, Jonathan enters Catherine’s and, after a spate of transactional sexual banter and foreplay, mostly on her part, he enters her. Afterward, camera in hand, he convinces her to recreate her in flagrante poses so that he can photograph them. For reasons that any viewer can readily, if cynically adduce (adventurism, narcissism, an urge for independence), Catherine does as he demands. After taking the photos, Jonathan departs. The next day, we see Catherine and Jonathan reprising their passion in a locker room stall at the beach. She then falls asleep on a blanket while her son plays in a rubber dinghy next to her. She awakens to stormy seas and no son or dinghy beside her. She scans the roiling water and spies the boy in the dinghy, floating across monstrous, engulfing waves.
Jonathan, who is nearby, dives into the raging waters, rescues the oblivious boy, and then drowns. Years later, Jonathan’s mother Nancy confronts Catherine, who, in a fit of non-specific frustration, cuts the encounter short and flees.
It turns out that Nancy is writing a book based on having viewed her son’s photographs while gathering his effects, but not sharing her discovery with her husband Stephen (Kevin Kline), a retired school teacher. When Nancy dies of cancer, Stephen comes upon, and reads her manuscript. It is based on what the lurid photos alone suggest about the brief encounter between Catherine and Jonathan. To avenge the death of his son, Stephen arranges to have the manuscript published and distributes the resulting paperback widely, but most pertinently, to a coterie consisting of Catherine’s now-adult son Nicholas; Robert, his father; and the office staff Catherine supervises at the agency where she works, all of who react virally, invoking virtual horror and disgust.
It becomes Stephen’s mission to wreak havoc and ruin upon the lives of Catherine, Robert, and Nicholas. All along, Catherine, overwhelmed by the exposure the book has wrought, is shunned by all parties who receive and read it, and finds no quarter for uttering a word in her own defense. When Robert shoehorns her out of her own home, she retreats to her mother’s modest cottage, the only available refuge, where her semi-demented mother’s likely last act of succor reinvigorates Catherine. She manages a pivot that hijacks the aggressor Stephen’s attention in a scene that caps tour de force performances by both Blanchett and Kline.
Deconstructing the series is de rigeur, if for no other reason than realigning one’s psychic tires after we careen through its convulsive reveal. In its flutter of disturbing contradictions, “Disclaimer” benefits from two situationally-specific serial cinematographic treatments and custom-crafted changes in its score and lighting—a miracle of seamless effects that point up the storytelling so that no detail goes awry.
In a Y!-Entertainment interview with Jackie Strause, Cuarón says this about the film’s charge:
“. . . the danger [is] that we’re living in this world that is overpopulated by narratives. We’re invaded by narratives and we have become addicted to narratives. And now, narratives are becoming just a tidbit of information, rather than a whole analysis and contemplation. In this world that we’re addicted to, it’s very confusing, because we’re invaded by these conflicting narratives all the time. One that hits emotional cords is going to hit the strongest. And particularly if it confirms — as [journalist] Christiane Amanpour says at the beginning of “Disclaimer” — your most deeply held beliefs. All these narratives, it’s not that they’re creating those behaviors. They are awaking dormant behaviors that are already there.
Toba Singer
