‘Beware of narrative and form,” warns a character at the start of Disclaimer. The viewer’s spirit naturally quails at such a glaring opening statement. But it’s got Cate Blanchett in it and Kevin Kline, and Alfonso Cuarón directing, and it’s on Apple TV+ which is no slouch of a streamer, so we rally and go on.
Is it worth it? Not quite. Blanchett plays garlanded TV documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft. She is for some reason married to Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), a man who calls her “poppet”. Truly, other people’s relationships are a mystery. She receives a copy of an independently published novel called The Perfect Stranger. It is dedicated to “My son Jonathan” and – get this! – the disclaimer at the front reads: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” When she reads the book, it becomes clear that the protagonist is her and that the author knows the secret she has been keeping from the poppet-monster for 20 years.
Kline plays widower Stephen Brigstocke, alone since the deaths of his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) nine years ago and their 19-year-old son Jonathan many years before that. Now, in forced retirement after losing his rag with one of the “devious entitled brats” he was teaching, he is in the process of disposing of his wife’s belongings when he finds some photographs from his son’s final holiday and an unpublished manuscript written by Nancy and hidden in her dresser.
A second timeline, usually seen via flashbacks suffered by an increasingly anxious Catherine, parcel out the truth – or apparent truth. Beware of narrative and form, remember. It appears to involve a holiday in Venice with her four-year-old son Nicholas, an affair with a hot young thing called Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and a tragedy on the beach. Everything entwines and converges over the next six outings. 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.
The rest of the time, you could happily puree Disclaimer. Or at the very least its script, in which there are even worse things happening than “poppet”. Written by Cuarón, it relies terribly heavily on voiceovers – sometimes from characters, more often from an omniscient second-person narrator (Indira Varma) – apparently to make doubly sure that no credibility attaches to the ciphers being moved (gorgeously. It’s beautifully shot. But beware seductive form, I guess) about the screen. We see Catherine lying awake in bed as dawn breaks. “You were awake most of the night,” says the unseen Varma. “Feeling strangled by freshly unburied memories.”
I suppose without that we might have thought she had forgotten she just read a strange book revealing a life-destroying secret and was lying there trying to hold in a fart. Whether memories can strangle is a discussion for another time. I am willing to entertain both sides. But I hold firm to the notion that you do not need to footnote Blanchett’s acting.
Only she and the other true pros can manage the dialogue. There is barely an authentic note in it. “Let me cook dinner tonight,” says Catherine. “That’s so lovely of you,” says Robert, her husband of at least 20 years. “But you’ve been very, very stressed about that book.” Most of us would assume our husbands were being controlled by bots at this point, but Catherine ploughs on with a suggestion of sole meunière. Robert gives in, advising they be paired with the Puligny-Montrachet. (By suppertime, however, he will have received his own copy of the book, along with some choice photos from the late Jonathan’s collection and be more in the mood for meths. Stories have power, but stories with full colour illustrations of your wife “enjoying pleasure with abandon” rule supreme.)
Disclaimer gestures throughout towards those wafty questions threatened by the opening lines. Who gets to tell stories, control the narrative and what stock do we put in which tellers? Is there such a thing as objective truth or are we doomed to a life of competing subjectivities, futilely chasing certainty until we die?
And most importantly, what kind of idiot starts frying sole meunière when it’s already obvious her husband is going to be late?
• Disclaimer is on Apple TV+ now
