Cate Blanchett’s Apple Thriller Fails

No one films the ocean as a proxy for emotional extremes like Alfonso Cuarón. In films like “Children of Men,” “Gravity” and “Roma,” the Mexican director — often in conjunction with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — makes roiling waves a metaphor for everything from rebirth to safety to cathartic rebirth. In this respect, the new Apple TV+ series “Disclaimer,” which Cuarón wrote and directed in its entirety, is a perfect fit for the “Y tu mamá también” auteur. “Disclaimer” centers on competing accounts of a young man’s fatal drowning on an Italian beach, and you can bet your bottom lira there are numerous and lengthy scenes built around the rhythmic crash of water.

But Cuarón is a much less intuitive match for other aspects of “Disclaimer,” which he adapted from Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name. “Disclaimer” is, at its core, a talky, interpersonal drama about grief, self-deception and storytelling, a genre that does not play to the strengths of a filmmaker who tends to package intimacy in epic spectacle. (Even “Roma,” a memoir of his own upbringing in Mexico City, incorporated elements like a massive student uprising.) Nor does “Disclaimer” itself take well to its new medium. The series is neither the first book-to-TV project to cling to devices, like excessive narration, best left on the page, nor is it the only show driven by marquee film talent, like stars Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, to struggle with episodic pace and structure. “Disclaimer” starts as a strange, confounding watch, and ends with a twist sapped of impact by the seven hours that precede it.

After her triumphant turn as Phyllis Schlafly in “Mrs. America,” Blanchett returns to television for “Disclaimer” as Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed documentarian suddenly confronted by an incident from her past. Catherine’s actual work is ignored by the show in favor of its symbolic import: She’s dedicated her life to unveiling the truth, but when a self-published novel called “The Perfect Stranger” lands on her doorstep, the book’s contents imply her affluent existence may be built on a lie. Its titular disclaimer declares that any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.

“The Perfect Stranger’s” publication, we learn, is the work of Stephen Brigstocke (Kline, shockingly convincing as a Brit), who throws himself into an elaborate quest for revenge after losing his job as a teacher and his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) to cancer. It was Stephen and Nancy’s son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) who died on his gap year in Italy all those years ago, and “Disclaimer” alternates between Stephen’s pursuit of Catherine and flashbacks that seem to explain why he blames her for Jonathan’s fate. 

Lubezki, an executive producer who shares DP duties with Bruno Delbonnel, saturates these scenes with a golden-hour glow that illustrates Jonathan’s infatuation with a younger Catherine (Leila George), on a vacation with her five-year-old son. In the present, Stephen sends compromising photographs of Catherine to her posh husband Rob (Sacha Baron Cohen, enjoyably pathetic as a cuckold), who enters a downward spiral of sexual insecurity, and catfishes her now-adult son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a slacker who lives in a dingy shared flat and works at an appliance store. Smit-McPhee, so captivating in “The Power of the Dog,” is wasted as a burnout whose degeneracy is lazily signaled by his love of hip-hop.

Whether or not Stephen’s master plan is ultimately righteous, there should be a little more nasty fun in watching him immiserate Catherine so completely. Sporting bushy eyebrows and Nancy’s favorite pink cardigan, Kline seems to be giving a more comedic performance than Cuarón settled on in the edit, practically rubbing his hands together as he plays the doddering old man to his clueless marks. Instead, Cuarón roots the show in Catherine’s extended breakdown. The roving camera seems to hunt Blanchett through her character’s London townhouse and hip industrial office space, both impeccably rendered in contrast with Stephen’s dowdy row house by production designer Neil Lamont and set decorator Pancho Chamorro.

Unfortunately, Blanchett is operating in a mode she’s already perfected elsewhere. As another wealthy woman getting her comeuppance, she won an Academy Award for “Blue Jasmine”; as a celebrated figure staring down the barrel of cancellation, she gave the performance of a lifetime in “Tár.” But as Catherine, she’s doubly handicapped. First, Cuarón insists on employing a verbose, second-person narration — “Your misguided belief you had a right to silence has condemned you” — by Indira Varma. (At least Stephen gets to voice his own thoughts, though neither audio track is especially additive.) Second, Catherine’s side of the story is strategically withheld until the last minute, a decision that fails to generate suspense while still taking a toll on the character.

By the time Catherine portentously proclaims, “It is time for my voice to be heard!”, it has long been obvious that the Italy interludes, including some startlingly graphic sex scenes that portray Catherine as a horny MILF and Jonathan her adoring disciple, do not represent the objective truth. But “Disclaimer” delays the reveal until long after any tension has given way to aimless angst. The momentum of both Stephen’s chase and Catherine’s need to defend herself peters out in a way it might not in a compact feature film. If you’re tired of reading that criticism of prestige miniseries, imagine how tired critics like me are of making it!

What “Disclaimer” builds to, and what these flaws fatally undercut, is an unsuccessful attempt at feminist commentary. When “The Perfect Stranger” gains some popular traction, a bookseller describes the Catherine surrogate as “this awful female character.” Like “Fleishman Is In Trouble,” another adaptation that struggled to translate its pointed perspective flip into television, “Disclaimer” can’t find a more artful way to make its metafictional argument about women’s obscured points of view.

There’s a surreal, Kafkaesque cast to how totally Catherine’s world turns on her that “Disclaimer” doesn’t embrace enough to transform into pure allegory. The show simply seems unbelievable, both in terms of its characters’ behavior and, tragically, the real biases it works to highlight. Cuarón crafts some indelible images in the process, but can’t shape “Disclaimer” into a functional vessel for its own story.

The first two episodes of “Disclaimer” are now available to stream on Apple TV+, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Fridays.