An Obvious Disavowal

“Disclaimer” (Directed by Alfonso Cuarón Orozco from Renée Knight’s novel, 2024; Apple TV)

Prima facie, this appears to be a clever, intriguing, well-made, beautifully-performed dramatic series, with a cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville. A revenger’s tragedy, where a woman’s wicked past comes back to haunt her, undermine her marriage, further alienate her son, and damage her career. A series of flashbacks – the default of weak or flawed narratives, real and confected – terminates with cartoon-telescoping straight from a Warner Bros. cartoon, or Happy Tree Friends.

These scenarios, unfortunately, are not only ludicrous, but cynically so, involving plot-twist-cheating on an epic scale. At the black heart of this high-end trash, there are two cavernous black holes in particular. First, unless the revengers are metaphors for the conscience of Blanchett’s character (“Catherine Ravenscroft” – even the name seems to come from Barbara Cartland or Mills & Boon), there are insufficient objective inferences, let alone facts, such that the story, and the case against her, could never be mounted. Second, apart from an adulterous summer fling in Italy and some arguable wilful and callous blindness, one struggles to convict the woman of wickedness. I rather subscribe to L.P. Hartley’s statement: “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault.” And I know that’s old fashioned stuff, but I was vindicated at finale (which was predicted and predictable), and took no pleasure from it.

The whole mélange has not a jot of subtlety or credibility, and is psychologically weak in the extreme. Whilst there is much diverting sex, it is presented with determined bad taste and insensate boorishness. We add that the icky, creepy scene, where the young woman teases-out the boy’s sexual fantasies concerning Kylie Minogue, looks and plays false – it is a conversation that might be deployed by a perverted uncle, rather than a young mother, or imagined by a grieving older mother, IMHO.

All one can conclude, fairly comfortably, is that Kline’s and Manville’s characters are psychotic; that Cate (a great actress, particularly in roles where she’s coming apart) is enjoying a conceit of heroic masochism (but her younger ‘self’ looked more like a young Greta Scacchi); that boys and young men (who are inept at handling knives and forks, especially knives) are stupid, callous, selfish, and criminal; that the heroine’s husband has the resolve of a month-old damp lettuce, and that the ridiculously pompous and sanctimonious staff at Ravenscroft’s documentary studio are so stupid as to require their summary dismissal.