Disclaimer

The storytelling is exceptional — Cuarón writes sublimely about family dynamics, sexual jealousy and the definitive lies that we tell to those closest to us and the greater ones we tell, ultimately, to ourselves. It’s thoughtful, disturbing, thrilling and sometimes even overwhelmingly good. Just don’t call it TV.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but the strength of Disclaimer’s two-part premiere is in the production, an edit that flows seamlessly across different timelines with unique color palettes, narration POVs, and tones.

Some formal choices guide you toward the truth, while other cues are deliberate red herrings, hooking you on a line that leads right back to your own rod. In the end, I expect more than a few bitter reactions to Cuarón’s most provocative project since “Y tu mamá también.” But no one can argue they went in unprepared.

Disclaimer challenges our perceptions of truth while delivering an edge-of-the-seat psychological thriller. [28 Oct - 17 Nov 2024, p.4]

The TV event series of the new season exposes the lies a celebrated documentarian (a knockout Cate Blanchett) tells her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and herself about a novelist (Kevin Kline, Emmy worthy) who writes about a shocking sex scandal from her youth that only pretends to be fiction.

Ms. Blanchett, Mr. Cohen and the predictably glorious Ms. Manville are all wonderful—there are moments that are startling in their frankness and genuine emotion; “Disclaimer” may prove a watershed in the gravitation of grown-up cinema to television, out of the Marvel universe of the multiplex and into a realm where someone like Mr. Cuarón and company can construct a story that deserves seven parts to tell.

No one comes to “Disclaimer” looking for solemnity, nor will you find it. Instead, it’s an elegantly woven tapestry of torment, which grips you by the head and forces you to stare at the trainwreck of two people’s lives, caught in the riptide of pain.

“Disclaimer” is tremendously acted and directed and designed with painstaking detail.

This [its contortionist plot] can make the characters feel more like chess pieces than people you might care about, excellent performances notwithstanding. A course-correcting monologue by Blanchett late in the game is a splendid bit of acting that does much to put things in order — and Cuarón’s stylistic devices do make more sense retrospectively — though a brief epilogue does twist them around again.

It’s all beautifully shot, which is no surprise. And if it isn’t quite as deep as you might have hoped, no matter. Because it’s a lot more fun than it could have been.

Disclaimer is a series that, like life, is unpredictable, breathtaking, and, at times, deeply troubling. Most of all, it's not what it seems.

Cuaron brings his usual visionary mastery to the story, but the true achievement is in the performance he gets from Blanchett, Lesley Manville, and, especially, Kline. [Oct 2024, p.77]

The series has a rich texture, both tactile and dreamy. When the story wades into the hot-button issue of cancellation, it stumbles. But its emotional arithmetic is just right: heightened to near melodrama while also dreadfully credible.

At the core of it, “Disclaimer” is elegant trash. It’s the TV series equivalent of that juicy beach novel you bought at the beginning of last summer, the one that plunged you into a world filled with complicated and deeply flawed people caught up in a web of intrigue. It’s best enjoyed if you don’t check the Logic Meter readings too many times.

The level of the talent involved, Cuarón especially, is remarkable. But it feels way too similar to other limited series and movies — specifically the ones based on thrillers from the Gillian Flynn section of the bookstore. Complaining about this feels a bit like complaining about water being wet.

Ultimately, “Disclaimer” finishes strong, Cuarón making a powerful statement—not anti cancel-culture so much—but about the need for compassion, restraint, and how over-zealous condemnations all make us complicit in a slippery slope culture of spiteful and ungenerous castigation.

Altogether, it relatively convincingly drives at its central thesis: you shouldn’t always believe what you see on TV.

Disclaimer, driven by tricky and playful lead performances from Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, may be one of those shows that’s more fascinating to talk circles around than to actually watch.

There are a few genuinely poignant moments scattered through Disclaimer’s run, but taken as a whole, it’s a rough watch, putting its characters through the wringer and wallowing in overheated melodrama with lots of wailing and crying.

If “Disclaimer” is prestige pulp, Cuarón is more interested in the prestige than the pulp. After expertly turning the screws, the series slackens in the final stretch. A twist is revealed late in the story, resulting in a tidy resolution that is all fizzle, no fizz.

It almost works. But a sudden rush of revelations in the last two episodes upends much of what came before and resolves the story far too neatly. Having created a series that invested so much in exploring contradictions, Cuarón’s reliance on simple certainties is ultimately both disappointing and dissatisfying.

In the series’s straight-ahead thriller sections, he [Cuarón] excels at building tension and staging horror. .... Still, “Disclaimer” is easier to admire than to enjoy. It grows increasingly and unproductively grim as it builds toward its well-telegraphed moral. It is the kind of accomplishment that you remember not emotionally but mechanically; you want to spread the parts out on a workbench and examine how they fit together.

Works when it embraces its pulpier instincts but unwisely opts, during its table-turning finale, to wag its finger at anyone who might have enjoyed its more thriller-ish aspects.

For a filmmaker, twist-heavy plots pose two obvious challenges: clarity and plausibility. Cuarón handles the first pretty well, the second not so much. .... The problem is that the dislikable things are done by or done to such consistently dislikable people. Caring about what happens next and why is puzzle-solving. Caring about the people involved is something more. “Disclaimer,” alas, is something less.

The final episodes put the pieces together but repeat too much previous information and force the brilliant Kline into too many iterations of dastardly yet likable. By episode six, you wonder if this material is better suited to a movie.

Slow, turgid, self-important but beautifully shot episodes are interspersed with the occasional scene – usually courtesy of an astonishing Manville – that pops up amid the stilted, mannered rubbish on screen and suddenly bursts your heart with grief, then puts it in a blender and purees it.

Disclaimer is too much time to spend with characters that the filmmaker regards with indifference at best and ignorance at worst. Cuarón renders this tale of rage, regret, and retribution in broad strokes. He loses the thread on their interiority, outsourcing the conveyance of their feelings to long-winded internal monologues.

The infuriating voice-over is, unfortunately, all of a piece with a thriller that is at least thrilling – two stars for that – but is otherwise overwrought. The dialogue is hackneyed and the very, very long sex scenes smack of desperation.

Cuarón’s scripts, by contrast [to "Fleishman Is in Trouble"], are rootless and simplistic, and Blanchett’s chilly, patrician protagonist merely recalls the actor’s more layered performances in superior projects like “Tár” and “Mrs. America.” Bizarre, affectless second-person narration describes the scenes we’re already watching or provides only the most insipid exposition.

When the concluding stretch arrives, the final set of revelations includes ones you see coming from a mile away, but by then, you may be wondering why you stuck with it.