Is TV’s next sure-fire hit, “Disclaimer”, a must-watch or a dud?

Read the early reviews of “Disclaimer” and you may be confused. Write-ups of the seven-part thriller, which debuts on Apple TV+ on October 11th, lurch between two stars and five. Is the lavish series, directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Cate Blanchett (pictured), a must-watch or dud? Whom should you trust, the boosters or carpers? The answer is both. The show is an example of what might be called good-bad art, and a lesson in evaluating it.

Ms Blanchett is Catherine Ravenscroft, a British documentary maker. She and her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) have a sumptuous pad in London and a troubled adult son. The title alludes to a note in a novel that arrives in the post: in this case, any resemblance to real people is not, in fact, a coincidence. The people in question are Catherine herself and a young man, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), whom she met long ago on the Italian coast.
Jonathan drowned. But how? The roman à clef is part of a spiralling vendetta by his father, Stephen (Kevin Kline), which also relies on intimate photos taken in Italy and a social-media account that resurrects the dead. In a two-way pursuit, Catherine must track Stephen down as he methodically destroys her.
To say a work of art is flawed or uneven is tautologous. None is perfect, not even “Hamlet” or “Some Like it Hot”. But the flaws in “Disclaimer” are not the glitches inevitable in all mortal endeavours. They are glaring.
The plot crumbles under scrutiny: characters know things they couldn’t and behave inexplicably. You might expect some synergy between Catherine’s job (unearthing the truth) and her urgent personal mission (ditto). Nope. “You are so cancelled, Catherine!” yells a colleague in one of many clunky lines.
Then there is the voice-over. Meant to relay inner thoughts, it sounds distractingly like Alexa. The graphic sex scenes seem gratuitous as they unfold; they seem more so after a twist drastically recasts the story’s gender politics. That twist feels like a hustle—less a coup de théâtre than an adult version of “And then they woke up.”
Mr Cuarón, who adapted the script from Renée Knight’s novel, has won five Oscars, including a clutch for “Roma”. At the Venice Film Festival, where “Disclaimer” had a warmly received premiere, he said he thought of it not as television but as “seven films”. In an age of prestige TV, this is as grand as it gets. On some measures, it is a letdown. On others, it is very good: not in a “so bad, it’s good” sort of way, nor merely good enough to be diverting, but hauntingly excellent.
The acting, like the dialogue, is mixed, but Ms Blanchett shines and, as Jonathan’s bereaved mother, Lesley Manville is heartbreaking. In a flashback, she wades into the fatal sea like a figure in ancient myth. Sequences and tableaux live up to the show’s pedigree. As the police inform Jonathan’s parents of his death, the living-room telly stays on, a relic of normality. Visiting his own son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in his squalid digs, Robert Ravenscroft focuses, as a father might, on a hole in his sock. Foxes, cats and a cockroach have memorable cameos.
Above all, “Disclaimer” reaches boldly for big themes, such as grief, erotic jealousy, marriage and its secrets, what parents do to children and vice versa. It dramatises the fragility of even the cushiest lives and asks whether, in revisiting old traumas, you salve the wound or prod it. In the end, this tricksy narrative makes viewers ponder the stories people tell about the past and each other. Some characters deludedly believe in the best of loved ones. Others too readily think the worst, particularly of women.
For all the differences in genre, era and setting, the artist whom this melange of pulp and profundity most recalls is Dostoyevsky. His good-bad yarns can seem histrionic and unkempt; but they offer immortal moments of drama and stare, unblinkingly, into the darkest recesses of the heart. “Disclaimer” has a seam of Dostoyevsky’s reckless honesty and shares his interest in the calibration of guilt. If, for powerful reasons, you wish a dreadful thing to happen, how guilty are you when it does?
All of which raises another set of questions, about art rather than morals. Which is a better measure of an artwork, its quality on average or its peaks? How should ambition be weighed against execution, jolting insight against missteps, the good against the bad? In Back Story’s book, good-bad art that lingers in the memory is worth more than the blandly palatable kind, read or watched serenely and instantly forgotten.
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