Disclaimer, Apple TV+ review - a misfiring revenge saga from Alfonso Cuarón

It seems to be silly season for big-name directors. First, Coppola’s Megalopolis and Steve McQueen’s Blitz: why? Now Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer: double why?

What happens in the minds of directors whose careers have matured and whose audiences have come to expect a degree of subtlety and sophistication from them? Apple TV+ has managed to commission Slow Horses, Bad Monkey, Presumed Innocent and Time Bandits of late, some of the best television drama around. But this time it’s come up short. 

Cuarón has recruited a motley crew, presumably with an eye to their global saleabitliy, for this exercise in streamer-fare-with-extra-glitz. Cate Blanchett, for one, as Catherine Ravenscroft, a fêted TV documentary director, whom we first see being given an encomium with a special award attached by a real-life TV personality, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Catherine, perfectly groomed and designer-dressed, is hailed as a “beacon of truth”, a woman lauded for shining an unforgiving light on her well established subjects. So you just know that gushy reputation will go down in flames. When a book arrives in the post that seems to be about her, she is convulsed with self-hatred, burns the book and struggles to regain her "focus".

Cool documentarians usually aren't this easily felled, and the script's attempt to enter this one's world strikes a phoney note from the off. It gets more pronounced. We then have to fathom why we are watching a dishevelled old teacher at a posh school — judging by the photos in the headmaster’s study, Eton — who has a pukka middle-class English name, Stephen Brigstocke, but a not quite so pukka English accent. Raking through the cast list, you wonder, who on earth is this? Finally it sinks in that this is the second-billed Kevin Kline (pictured below), whose face may have aged but whose body is still as lithe as that of a man 20 years younger. 

Next up is the oddly coiffed Robert, Catherine’s husband, who heads the family trust of honest brokers for the world’s leading charities: another seeker after goodness. He’s a wine buff – he and Catherine have a conversation with a straight face about the fact that he has decanted a bottle of the Latour ’82 to celebrate her award. “Oh, Robert,” she sighs, before admitting in a voiceover that she can hardly tell a red from a white. Who is this unicorn of a caring husband? Could it be…yes, under the perky brown wig it’s Sacha Baron Cohen. 

The couple’s son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit McPhee), actually uses what looks like his own hair as his younger self. He's a salesman of electrical appliances in a big department store. In the up-to-date main narrative strand, at 25 he has become that rare bird, a child who has been pushed out of the nest to become more independent and shares a rental (on a shopworker’s salary) in trendy Golborne Road, seemingly without parental assistance, as Catherine has ruled. He is withdrawn and tetchy with her, more voluble with Robert, about which she seems both regretful and envious.

This mismatched group’s lives are presented as a montage of scenes, some segments ending with an iris effect, to indicate these are past events. Key among the iris-ed scenes is a strand featuring a young couple, Sasha (Liv Hill) and Jonathan (Louis Partridge, pictured below), whose heavy breathing from a sleeper car to Venice opens the proceedings. Sasha is depicted as a young woman with an unchecked libido who doesn’t even want to press pause when the ticket collector arrives. What happens to Jonathan is the motor of Disclaimer’s turgid plot, first concocted as a novel by Renée Knight.

It takes until the end of episode one for what we have here to become clear: a revenge story, set in motion by Stephen when he finds a cache of revealing photos in the desk drawer where his late wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) spent her days alone, tapping away on an electric typewriter. She has also thoughtfully stashed the manuscript of the novel she wrote there in a secret wardrobe drawer, which Stephen also finds. It is nine years after her death. We will see some of the shots in the photos being taken by Jonathan on his Italian odyssey, including a sexy series featuring a beautiful blonde woman (Leila George) he encountered on a beach after his girlfriend received bad news and rushed home to London.

As Stephen starts machinating, the connections in the web start to form: who is related to whom, who probably did what to whom, and when and where. I won’t go into detail as revealing secrets is a key concern of the script (not characterisation, complex motivation, all that good stuff). You start fixating on the design, such as interiors that handily stratify the dramatis personae – Noguchi paper lampshades for the Ravenscrofts, in a giant room that’s more island than kitchen; sad 1970s decor and appliances for Stephen’s terraced house, where there’s a fox in the back garden and a lone cockroach on the kitchen counter.

Two episodes in, I am braced for twists and meta-elements; actually, I’m positively praying for some. The core revenge-plot Stephen is enacting is presumably the one laid out in Nancy’s novel, but there has to be more to this series than a potboiler about how a reprehensible woman gets her comeuppance… why else would Cuarón think it worth adapting? 

There are signs that he is still on board, guiding some bravura shots – a lurid Veneto sunrise through the moving train window as the young couple moan and groan beneath it is a promising start, along with some stunning shots of sunny Pisa. There is lively camerawork too as Robert opens the envelope of damning photos left for him at work by Stephen and chases his departing secretary round the building to find out who had delivered them. 

But mostly this doesn’t feel like the man who made Roma, or even Gravity; he feels adrift in the world of surfaces he has created, where marriages are secured by a good sole meunière. This is certainly true, anyway, of episodes one and two (the rest are embargoed until the week they drop). Cuarón doesn’t even seem to trust his estimable actors to project their true feelings and hidden motives in all the subtle ways they are skilled at and feels he has to add voiceovers by them, explaining what they are really feeling and thinking. Blanchett and Kline deserve better

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