“Disclaimer” Is a Baffling Misfire from a Great Auteur

At the climax of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film “Roma,” a woman named Cleo walks into the sea until the waves reach her neck. Cleo doesn’t know how to swim, but her stride is unhesitating: she sees two of her charges, young children belonging to the family for whom she works, helpless in the water. When the trio return to safety on the beach, her act of heroism seems to allow her to admit her comparative lack of maternal feeling toward her own recently stillborn baby. The outing ends soon thereafter, and Cleo’s duties resume the second she enters the house. She’s more beloved and indispensable than ever, but not any more a part of the family.

“Roma,” which was based on Cuarón’s affluent yet unsteady childhood in Mexico City, was heralded as a masterpiece—the zenith of a career that counts among its heights the films “Y Tu Mamá También,” “Children of Men,” and “Gravity.” What a crash landing, then, to arrive at his long-awaited follow-up, the Apple TV+ series “Disclaimer,” which Cuarón wrote and directed in full. The melodrama, which stars Cate Blanchett as a guilt-ridden mother confronted with her connection to a long-ago drowning in the Mediterranean, is, at best, a curiosity: a work of startling vacuity by one of modern cinema’s most exciting auteurs, and a would-be feminist parable about sex and power that can’t keep from feeling vaguely sleazy. Revelations emerge apace—about Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft, about the young man who drowned, and about the mysterious figure who won’t let Catherine forget her small but crucial role in that death—and yet none of these details make the characters more believable. The extent of the failure is baffling.

“Disclaimer” begins with Catherine, a celebrated TV documentarian in London, receiving a self-published novel in the mail. Strangely enough, she reads it; stranger still, she recognizes herself in it, as a young woman vacationing on the Italian coast two decades ago with her four-year-old son. The conceit, pulled from Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, is at first pleasingly retrograde, then turns remarkably stupid. Sending Catherine the book, titled “The Perfect Stranger,” is step one in a byzantine revenge plot that relies on everyone in Catherine’s life also reading the unedited paperback. Stories this preposterous should at least have the decency to be entertaining, but “Disclaimer” is persistently dull, padding out a feature’s worth of narrative into a seven-part miniseries with gratuitous hookups and enervating scenes of grief.

Catherine is presented as the archetypal unlikable woman: she is unapologetically ambitious at work; has kept secrets from her uxorious husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), who hails her as “a beacon of truth”; and kicked her wayward twentysomething son, Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee), out of the house after years of struggling to connect. If there’s irony to be mined from the case of an investigative journalist trying to hide potentially reputation-destroying information, the series doesn’t manage it. Not unlike 2022’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” “Disclaimer” aims to challenge how we gauge female behavior, and our quickness to judge any actions that might deviate from the self-sacrificing norm. But “Fleishman” was grounded in an upper-middle-class milieu, with traumas specific to its insular Upper East Side setting. Cuarón’s scripts, by contrast, are rootless and simplistic, and Blanchett’s chilly, patrician protagonist merely recalls the actor’s more layered performances in superior projects like “Tár” and “Mrs. America.” Bizarre, affectless second-person narration describes the scenes we’re already watching or provides only the most insipid exposition. “Marriage is delicate. Not just yours but all marriages,” the Siri-esque voice (Indira Varma) intones at one point, addressing Catherine. “And you think you have succeeded in keeping yours on course.” Such explanations, intended to illuminate, render her plight even less interesting than before.

“Disclaimer” leaps freely between past and present, and spends nearly as much time with Catherine’s tormentor—an elderly widower named Stephen, played by Kevin Kline—as it does with her. “The Perfect Stranger,” we learn in the pilot, was written years earlier by his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), as a fictionalized account of their teen-age son Jonathan’s untimely death. Catherine, who appears both in the novel and in the boy’s cache of erotic photos, was believed by Nancy to be complicit in his drowning. After stumbling upon the manuscript, Stephen sets out to ruin Catherine in turn. He stockpiles a hundred copies of the book, delivers duplicates of the photos to Robert, and spends much of his screen time shuffling around in an ill-fitting, moth-eaten pink cardigan that once belonged to his wife—behavior too cartoonishly deranged to say much about the corrosive effects of loneliness and loss. In the end, he has all the dimensionality of a slasher villain.

Occasionally, the show offers flashes of what might have been. Early on, Christiane Amanpour makes a cameo, presenting Catherine with an award for her journalistic achievements. In her introductory speech, Amanpour foreshadows what’s to come, warning that malefactors with enticing narratives can only manipulate us because of our eagerness to believe them. It’s a message that feels urgent in our era of curated realities—and a theme that gets easily lost, washed away in a tidal wave of dreck. ♦