At the climax of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2018 film Roma, a woman named Cleo wades through the ocean until the waves reach her neck. Cleo does not know how to swim, but her steps do not hesitate. She saw two young children, belonging to the family she works for, helpless in the water. When the trio returns to the safety of the beach, her heroic act seems to allow her to admit her lack of motherhood towards her newly stillborn baby. The outing ends shortly after that, and Cleo resumes her work as soon as she enters the house. She is more loved and indispensable than ever, but she is no longer part of the family.
Based on Cuaron’s affluent but unstable childhood in Mexico City, ROMA is based on the films “I Tu Mama También,” “Children of Men,” and “Gravity.” “And what a crash landing it was to land on the Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, the long-awaited sequel, written and directed entirely by Cuaron. This melodrama, starring Cate Blanchett as a guilt-ridden mother facing a connection to a long-ago drowning in the Mediterranean, is a curiosity at best. It’s a surprisingly empty film from one of modern cinema’s most exciting directors. It’s an aspiring feminist fable about sex and power, but it can’t help but feel vaguely vulgar. None of these details come as revelations emerge one after another about Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft, about the young man who drowned, and about the mysterious figure who will never let Catherine forget her small but important role in his death. It doesn’t add any authenticity to the characters. The extent of the failure is puzzling.
“Disclaimer” begins with Catherine, a well-known television documentary maker in London, receiving a self-published novel in the mail. Oddly enough, she read it. Strangely enough, she recognizes herself in it as a young woman who was vacationing on the Italian coast with her four-year-old son 20 years ago. This conceit, lifted from Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, is pleasantly retrograde at first, but then becomes noticeably stupid. Sending a book titled “The Perfect Stranger” to Katherine is the first step in a Byzantine revenge plot that relies on everyone in Katherine’s life reading the unedited paperback. A story as wild as this should at least have the decency to make it interesting, but Disclaimer remains boring, condensing a full-length story with gratuitous connections and heart-wrenching sadness. It has been expanded into a seven-part miniseries with scenes from
Catherine is portrayed as the typical hated woman. She is unapologetically ambitious at work. She has kept a secret from her disgraced husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), who praises her as a “beacon of truth.” And after years of struggling to get in touch, she kicks her wayward 20-something son Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee) out of the house. If there’s any irony to be gleaned from the case of an investigative journalist trying to hide information that could damage his reputation, this series just doesn’t manage it. Similar to 2022’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” “Disclaimer” explores how we judge women’s actions, and how we are quick to judge actions that may deviate from the norm of self-sacrifice. The purpose is to question this. However, “Fleischmann” was rooted in an upper-middle-class environment and suffered from trauma unique to the closed environment of the Upper East Side. By contrast, Cuarón’s script is rootless and simplistic, and Blanchett’s ruthless, aristocratic protagonist echoes the actor’s more layered performances in such great works as The Tar and Mrs. Martin. Just remember. America. “Weird, emotionless second-person narration either explains scenes we’ve already seen, or offers only the most bland explanations. “Marriage is a delicate thing. marriage,” a Siri-like voice (Indira Varma) says aloud to Catherine at one point. “And you think you’ve succeeded in getting your goal back on track.” Explanations like this, meant to be revealing, make her predicament even less interesting than it already was.
“Disclaimer” jumps freely between past and present, spending almost as much time with Katherine’s tormentor, Stephen, an elderly widow played by Kevin Kline. The pilot for “Perfect Stranger” reveals that his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), wrote it years ago as a fictionalized account of the untimely death of their teenage son, Jonathan. Catherine appears in both the novel and the boy’s hidden erotic photographs, which Nancy believes are complicit in his drowning. Stephen stumbles across the manuscript and sets out to destroy Catherine. He hoards 100 copies of the book, delivers a copy of the photo to Robert, and spends much of his screen time limping around in a misfitting, moth-eaten pink cardigan that once belonged to his wife. I am. The behavior is so cartoonish and insane that it is difficult to put into words. It speaks volumes about the corrosive effects of loneliness and loss. After all, he has all the dimensions of a slasher villain.
Occasionally, the show flashes what was going on. Early on, Christiane Amanpour makes a cameo appearance, presenting Catherine with an award for her work as a journalist. Amanpour foretold what was to come in his introductory speech, warning that criminals with compelling stories can only manipulate us through our eagerness to believe them. It’s a message that feels urgent in today’s highly selective reality, and it’s also a theme that can easily get lost and swept away in a tsunami of quagmire. ♦
