Summary
The premiere of Disclaimer is vibe-heavy. It’s beautifully constructed and acted but does run the risk of feeling a bit full of itself.
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I do think I’ve sussed Alfonso Cuaron’s Disclaimer out. As of Episode 1, it’s a handsomely constructed and wonderfully-acted Apple TV+ adaptation of Renee Knight’s same-titled novel. It feels deeply sophisticated. It’s also, one suspects, probably a bit too full of itself for the kind of mainstream audience streaming platforms are pitching to.
I’m always cautious of the kind of shows critics are supposed to like. Cuaron’s name alone carries some heft with it, followed readily by an expectation of quality. The quality is there, no doubt. But I’m less sure about the appeal. Disclaimer works on the basis of the simplest suspense principle possible – the characters have information that the audience is not yet privy to – and relies on its construction to do the heavy lifting. It’s pretty, certainly, but I do wonder if people will tire of the mystery before it shows its hand.
A Matter of Perspective
Episode 1 of Disclaimer plays out in two timelines; the present-day sequences are split fairly evenly between two perspectives. It’s clear from the outset that everything we’re seeing is connected, but it’s not immediately apparent how.
On the one hand, you have Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), an award-winning TV documentarian who has built a rather cozy family life with a husband and recalcitrant layabout son, neither of whom know anything about a past that is threatening to reveal itself through a novel she receives in the mail.
On the other hand, you have Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), an aging teacher who has become tired of shaping the young minds of “privileged brats”. He’s consumed by grief, having lost his wife, Nancy, nine years prior, and their son, Jonathan, decades before that. Having finally allowed himself to accept the loss of his wife – symbolized by him donating all of her old clothes and shoes to charity – he has discovered, in Nancy’s old purse, stacks of photographs of a trip Jonathan took to Italy, which include a woman he recognizes, and in a desk drawer in Jonathan’s old room, where Nancy isolated herself following his death, an unpublished manuscript.
The manuscript is dedicated to Jonathan. And the disclaimer reads: Any similarities to persons living or dead is not a coincidence. The implication is that this manuscript reveals what caused Jonathan’s death, and how Catherine is connected to it, in the guise of a fictional story that Stephen publishes under the title The Perfect Stranger.
The Italian Job
Louis Partridge as Jonathan Brigstocke (2001) | Image via Apple TV+
As mentioned above, a fair chunk of Disclaimer Episode 1 takes place in flashbacks to Jonathan’s trip to Italy, which he initially takes with his girlfriend, Sasha. These two are, in a word, annoying, but they’re a young, horny couple seeing the world for the first time, so that’s a given.
It isn’t immediately apparent how all this connects. Once Sasha is forced to return to London because of a family matter, Jonathan stays behind, so things start to make a bit more sense. He spends his days trying to find a similarly-aged English-speaker to bond with and largely fails, and finds himself taking photos. At the end of the episode, he takes a few of a beautiful blonde-haired woman on the beach, which turns out to be a younger Catherine with her son, Nicholas.
Given Nicholas’s age, Catherine’s married at this point. But it’s unmistakably her, which means that she’s intimately connected to Jonathan’s death, and the contents of The Perfect Stranger are likely to reveal in what way.
Artistic License
It is, needless to say, The Perfect Stranger that present-day Catherine receives in the mail, and her reaction to it is visceral. Once she starts reading it – having had her curiosity piqued by the dedication and disclaimer – she rushes to the bathroom to vomit. She later tries to burn it, and her panicked admissions that there are things about her life that she hasn’t told anyone are written off by her well-meaning husband, Robert, as a form of grief about having pushed a now-mid-twenties Nicholas to move out.
Speaking of Nicholas, he mentions he has also received a copy of the book. It was left on his till at work by a “satisfied customer”, and this news makes Catherine even more frantic. Nicholas clearly doesn’t recognise the significance of the book, which he has read to completion, but thinks the main character “deserved it” because she was “a selfish b*tch”. None this bodes well for Catherine, obviously.
It’s quite clear that Catherine is the villain of the novel, and that she dies in it, which could be seen as a form of wish-fulfilment, with Nancy trying to rationalize Jonathan’s death through fictional embellishment of a mostly true story. But both Nicholas and Stephen’s colleague and friend, Justin, who helps to publish the manuscript believing it’s Stephen’s, agree that the character deserved her fate. So, whatever Catherine did, whatever she’s so worried about the book exposing, it must be pretty severe.
There’s no wonder she’s worried. And, similarly, there’s no wonder that Stephen seems to determined to make her pay. It might take a while for Disclaimer’s premiere to arrive at this endpoint, but it does conclude with a lot of promise for the future. I just hope that subsequent episodes are happy to get to the point instead of languishing on the vibes.
Disclaimer debuted with two episodes and the second is much better.
