In the spirit of Strange Darling turning expectation on its ear, Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer slaps viewers in the face in a similar manner vis-à-vis exposing inherent prejudices about women. More to the point, the prejudices about women pertaining to how easily they can be branded as a slut, a whore, a Jezebel, etc. And without so much as a second thought. No questioning of the facts whatsoever—just perfectly ready to accept the fiction. Which is what Disclaimer is meta-ly all about…told through the skewed lens of a novel.
Based on Renée Knight’s 2015 book of the same name, Cuarón’s method for translating the “back and forth” through time periods—past and present—is to use a fairy tale-esque circle that closes in and out whenever he is focusing on the past story between Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) and Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge). A story that began sometime in the early 2000s, when both strangers were traveling in Italy. In Catherine’s “real adult” state, that meant staying at a luxury hotel with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen, who appears to be parodying Alan Rickman’s look in Love Actually), and her son, Nicholas (played as an “adult” by Kodi Smit-McPhee).
For Jonathan, however, it meant slumming it through various cities of Italy with his girlfriend, Sasha (Liv Hill), before she returned to London, cutting her part of the trip short. In The Perfect Stranger, the book that ends up being personally mailed to Catherine’s home address, the reason given for her abrupt departure is because her aunt was hit by a lorry while riding her bike and Sasha has to get back home immediately to partake of the mourning process. This leaves Jonathan to his own devices, opting to continue the journey without her. When Catherine opens the first page of the book to see the dedication, “To my son, Jonathan,” it’s evident that a chill goes up her spine—one further compounded by the additional “pre-book page” that reads, “Disclaimer: any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence” in lieu of saying it is one.
In the first episode (or “chapter”), after a “circled in” flashback to Jonathan on a train in Italy having sex with Sasha (to show us, among other things, that he’s an inexperienced premature ejaculator), Cuarón flashes to the present, where the viewer is introduced to Catherine for the first time while listening to Christiane Amanpour present her with an award from the Royal Television Society (Catherine receives the Television Journalism Outstanding Achievement Award). The speech she delivers in honor of Catherine should be an automatic dead giveaway of what’s to come, storytelling-wise, and yet, it still manages to go over the viewer’s inherently prejudiced head as they hear Amanpour tell the crowd, “Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate… [Catherine Ravenscroft] has cut through narratives and form that distract us from hidden truths to address some of the most difficult contemporary issues, allowing us an unflinching look at her subjects as they really are.”
At the same time, that last line can be interpreted to mean that there’s a cruel irony to what’s about to happen to her. That she herself is being exposed—unflinchingly—as she really is. Which is to say, as a cold-hearted bitch. A trope that is easy for so many to buy into despite all evidence to the contrary, including Amanpour adding to the speech, “Ladies and gentlemen, be aware, in the process of exposing her subject, Catherine demonstrates that they can manipulate us only because of our own deeply held beliefs and the judgments that we make. And in this way, Catherine reveals something more problematic and profound: our own complicity in some of today’s most toxic sins.” Among such toxic sins being to perennially paint women as villains for their presumed sexual “looseness.”
As the book form of the tale in The Perfect Stranger unfolds, the viewer is thus led to believe that while Catherine was on this lavish Italian holiday, Jonathan was the one pursued, seduced like Benjamin Braddock by Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. For isn’t that yet another accepted trope about the “older” woman? That she’s a predatory bia in heat looking for any young man that might still validate her by finding her desirable? This is clearly why it’s so “buyable” to the viewer that this could resemble at least a large bulk of the reality that’s been stylized in literary form by Jonathan’s mother, Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville). Her manuscript found tucked in the back drawer of the desk in Jonathan’s room where Nancy sat every day typing away until her life was finally ended by cancer. It is her husband, Stephen (Kevin Kline, clearly enjoying his “diabolical old coot” role), who finally unearths it and decides that Nancy would have wanted it to be published. Particularly after developing some old film canisters of Jonathan’s that show Catherine in many compromising positions that would seemingly indicate she was very much “into” her time with the youthful lad.
Spurred by the contempt of seeing these images for the first time and assuming Catherine was the “evil temptress” somehow responsible for his son’s drowning in Italy, Stephen makes it his sole mission in life to take Catherine and her reputation down. It starts with sending her a copy of the self-published book first, then ensuring that her son and husband gain access to it as well, hand-delivering copies to each one’s workplace. And even though he’s only concerned with a select few people reading the novel (including Catherine’s co-workers), it soon takes on a life of its own, becoming something of a sleeper hit as Stephen’s friend and former colleague, Justin (Art Malik), helps to push it into bookshops as his sort of unofficial agent.
Stunned by the past coming back to haunt her in the most unexpected way possible, Catherine scarcely does anything to contain the narrative, allowing her husband to effectively “send her away” to her mother’s house while he lets Nicholas move back in (it had been Catherine’s idea to tell him he needed to, at twenty-five, move out and try to be more independent). All the while, other telltale “tidbits” about how not is all as it seems are brought to the fore, particularly through the voiceover dialogue—some of it stated in first person, and other parts of it stated in third person (this in and of itself also being a major clue about subjectivity playing into false objectivity). One such line that further hints at Jonathan’s less- than-angelic nature is Stephen’s voiceover in episode three, when he and his wife are summoned to Italy to identify their son’s body. On the way to the beach where the drowning occurred, Stephen internally notes, “I regret that I often considered Jonathan spoiled and misguided. It shames me to recognize I never believed in his courage. But I can’t recall any other time when Jonathan didn’t put himself first before anyone else. Not once. So why then? Why did he try to save that child? Was it just reckless impulsiveness?”
The child in question is Nicholas, with the ongoing accusation being that Jonathan sacrificed himself to the choppy waters that day in order to save Catherine’s son from drowning. And Catherine, with language failing her, can’t seem to do anything to better explain the nuances of why Jonathan might really be inclined to do such a thing (in a nutshell, let’s say it was a matter of feeling remorseful enough on his part to try to make up for something he did).
As for the source material itself, the back of Knight’s book reads, “Imagine if the next thriller you read was all about you.” An ominous thought indeed. Something about it smacking of that Black Mirror season six episode, “Joan Is Awful,” wherein the eponymous Joan (Annie Murphy) sits down to watch a show on “Streamberry” (a.k.a. Netflix) with her boyfriend one night, only to find that the first episode of it exactly replays the events of her day, complete with cruelly firing one of her employees and cheating on her boyfriend. Salma Hayek plays Joan, while none other than Disclaimer’s own Cate Blanchett plays yet another version of Joan being watched by Hayek on the TV within a TV. The difference, of course, is that Joan’s life isn’t all that skewed (with Streamberry writing the scripts based on the data collected from her phone). In contrast, Catherine becomes the subject of a mother’s own twisted fantasy/delusion about the way things “really” happened. A means to cope with the loss through art, looking for a concrete villain to blame for Jonathan’s death—despite knowing, somewhere within, that her son was not the “innocent,” “unimpeachable” person that a mother’s love insisted she believe him to be.
In this regard, too, Disclaimer makes another powerful statement about how the often toxic relationship between mother and son (in this instance, between both Nancy and Jonathan and Catherine and Nicholas) can become the root cause of the misogyny in our society that is permitted to continuously run rampant. Then again, this, too, manages to find fault solely with “the woman” in the scenario, doesn’t it?
