One of my favourite no-miss TV pitches is “What if this couple have a slightly difficult time in their marriage while inside an absolutely beautiful house?”.
The headlines for Disclaimer (from Friday, 11 October), the Apple TV+ show where a couple have a slightly difficult time in their marriage while inside an absolutely beautiful house, will focus on the big three hits: that Cate Blanchett is in it; that Alfonso Cuarón wrote and directed it, so it’s unnecessarily cinematic in a way that makes your throat tighten with its beauty; Kevin Kline’s astounding multi-age turn as a former teacher hellbent on an unusual kind of revenge. But what’s really important is: Blanchett’s icily middle-class Catherine Ravenscroft is married to Sacha Baron Cohen’s smugly foodie middle-class Robert Ravenscroft, and they are in a house, and that house is gorgeous.
Someone drinks a glass of wine at the kitchen sink. Someone’s phone buzzes and they go to another room to answer it. Blanchett takes off her heels after a mildly disappointing evening at an awards show. Difficult marriage, difficult marriage. But every moment of difficulty they have there makes me want to pull up Zoopla and make myself sick.
What’s Disclaimer about, then? Well, yeah, that’s the point: you’re never really supposed to know. Based on Renée Knight’s bestseller, it’s a multi-timeline drama, occasionally interrupted by a random line of narration for no reason at all, that is compelling in a uniquely frustrating way. Blanchett’s Ravenscroft is a documentary-maker, and one day she discovers a thin self-published book. (To really believe Disclaimer, you have to understand that every human being, when randomly posted a book in a Jiffy bag, will read the whole thing immediately, which Blanchett does.) It’s here she realises the random book is about her, so tries to set fire to it in a sink. In a separate scene that takes absolutely ages to become connected, Kline is walking around his empty old house wearing his dead wife’s cardigan. Baron Cohen has also just discovered a book in a Jiffy bag and read it entirely, so now he’s really drunk on a bus. Occasionally we zap back 20 years to Italy and see some half-snapshotted memories of a holiday. Eventually, Blanchett’s adult son, Kodi Smit-McPhee, discovers a Jiffy bag with a book in it. You can probably gather what happens next.
I mean, it’s beautiful to look at. But the theme of Disclaimer – that the way a story is told and who it is told by can often get in the way of the reality of it – bleeds into the telling in a way that you’re either going to find fascinatingly deft and clever or annoying to the point of frustration. The book itself (the real one the series is based on, not the fake one in the Jiffy bag everyone is compelled to set fire to) leans hard on having two narrators with two different versions of the central event that blasted everyone’s lives apart. To make that work as TV, there needs to be some real narrative push–pull – what we are shown and told, necessarily, has to be woozy and not quite upfront. As a result, Disclaimer spins all over the place: first we’re here, now we’re there, now we’re in the past.
Although it’s quite refreshing to be presented with a mystery that isn’t deliberately red herringy, Disclaimer does something else that can be just as annoying: it’s obtuse, constantly telling you stuff and showing you stuff, but lots of it never really means anything. What I normally say when I can’t decide if something is good or bad or not is “it’s very narratively clever”. And listen: this is very narratively clever!
In fact, it may be so clever that it’s one of the most capricious shows of recent years: I’ve never seen so many beautiful iris shots combined with such schlocky bestsellery plot points; A-list actors bouncing off extras I assume they found in a cave community of people who have never said a sentence out loud before; stupendous sound design underneath lines of dialogue that must have first been written on the back of a children’s menu in crayon; and, of course, loads of scenes of people on iPhones.
But perhaps we’re looking too close at Disclaimer, and trying to figure out what it’s about. It’s about how nice the oven and worktop combination is in Cate Blanchett’s kitchen. Everything else is kind of extraneous to that, and if you like it then, well, that’s on you.
