Cate Blanchett on the ‘poetic reality’ of Disclaimer, the TV series that is like ‘seven movies, back to back’

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There are a number of games being played throughout the seven episodes, or “chapters” as its creator prefers to call them, of Alfonso Cuarón’s excellent new limited series Disclaimer.

Premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday, Disclaimer follows the cat-and-mouse drama between award-winning documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) and retired private-school teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline). At the outset of the story, the two are separated by generations, geography and class, the central mystery of Disclaimer being how the two could be possibly connected – let alone so intertwined as to fuel what appears to be Stephen’s vendetta to shame Catherine from public life.

To get to the terribly upsetting answer, Cuarón – adapting the page-turning novel by Renee Knight – engages his audience in a number of visual and narrative games, the nature of which veers between luxuriously high-minded and of the cheaply parlour variety.

Reputations are ruined, relationships are tested, and the past comes back to haunt the living with such ferocity that some characters might simply wish themselves dead. But the greatest contest of wills comes from Blanchett’s side of things, given that her character must remain what might charitably be called an enigma until Disclaimer’s very final chapter, which upends the entirety of the story with such blunt force that audiences might be compelled to rewatch the entire thing over again, to spot the clues and cues.

Which is exactly the effect that Blanchett was hoping to achieve when she signed onto the ambitious project, shot largely in chronological order, across continents and with some of the film world’s top names (including cinematographers Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel) working to elevate the small-screen form into something bigger.

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“There was an incredible amount of tension in that my character doesn’t get to express her perspective for quite a number of those chapters, so it was challenging to be ambiguous for that long and live with that amount of tension,” Blanchett says in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival last month.

The actress is at TIFF as Disclaimer makes the fall season’s film-festival rounds, another indication that the creative team considers the production so much more than another offering of binge-able small-screen content. Just as Cuarón has never called Disclaimer a “series” in interviews, so, too, does Blanchett refer to the project exclusively in the more cinema-friendly language of “chapters” rather than “episodes.”

“It was almost like making seven movies back to back,” Blanchett says. “And with the greatest cinematographers alive lighting it, too. Which meant there was a lot of wait time. But you learn to manage that – that’s the job.”

The job in Disclaimer’s case adds up to one of Blanchett’s most challenging roles in a career overflowing with them. As Catherine, who is targeted by Stephen with such brute and righteous force that the audience is compelled almost immediately to vilify her, Blanchett must portray a woman constantly on the defence. As the series jumps back and forward in time, though, the real stakes of Disclaimer reveal themselves.

As to how audiences might experience the story – the lucky few at TIFF and the Venice Film Festival were able to watch either a selection of chapters or the entirety of Disclaimer on a big screen, the way Cuarón intended – Blanchett is philosophical about both the state of the medium and her place within it.

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“With serialized storytelling, in a way you became a slave to the narrative. So even though the faces and voices we’re seeing on screen are less homogeneous than they used to be, the way these things are released and commissioned is becoming increasingly homogeneous,” she says. “Things that are wildly different can start to taste the same. And what I loved about Alfonso is he said, ‘I don’t know how to make that stuff.’ So he was really making a movie divided into seven chapters.”

Although it is not as if Blanchett has shied away from television until now. The actress got her start on Australian television, and just four years ago headlined the prestige FX limited series Mrs. America.

“It sounds a little pretentious to call them ‘chapters,’ but it’s true,” Blanchett says, referring to Disclaimer. “Somehow the intention that it be seen in a cinema keeps the ideas big, and I think allows you to reach dare I say a poetic reality that doesn’t always have to make narrative sense. That’s what I love about this – there’s a rhythmic sense to this series, or film, which defies I suppose more conventionally made things.”

One of the most technically challenging projects of Cuarón’s innovative career – think of the director’s swirling “single-take” shot during the car hijacking in Children of Men, or the free-floating chaos of Gravity – Disclaimer took the better part of a year to shoot, with Blanchett and the rest of the cast (including Sacha Baron Cohen in a rare dramatic role, playing Catherine’s husband) having to live with their characters, and their shifting perspectives, for longer than a feature film, or even a single-season series, might require.

“We’re still shooting Disclaimer, I think,” Blanchett says with a laugh, noting how she took a year off after the project, and then refreshed herself with the political farce Rumours from Canadian directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, a movie that could not be more dissimilar in tone and execution.

“In a strange way, each job is by default not by design an antidote to the one before it,” Blanchett says, emphasizing that accidental scheduling and good timing rules the day, not necessarily thematic or storytelling sensibility.

However Blanchett’s schedule might have made room for Disclaimer, though, its final episode – or chapter, apologies – makes the entire endeavour worthwhile, even monumental.

“That last episode was very important, and Cate was adamant about it working – not just as an actor in the film, but as a full-time collaborator,” Cuarón says in a separate interview. “Her credit as an executive producer is not just cosmetic. She was very concerned about how we would not cheat at any moment. It is her work.”

Disclaimer’s first two episodes premiere Oct. 11 on Apple TV+, with new episodes added every Friday through Nov. 8.

Review

Disclaimer

Written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline

Classification N/A; 343 minutes

Streaming on Apple TV+

Critic’s Pick

With the seven-chapter epic Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón delivers what might be either the last great act of the prestige-television era, or perhaps a rattling echo of the medium’s greatest days, back when The Sopranos and The Wire fired up audiences’ imaginations as to what can be accomplished with serialized storytelling.

Split across perspectives and voice-overs – including the rare second-person narration – Disclaimer details the animosity between a retired London schoolteacher named Stephen (Kevin Kline, adopting a very convincing English accent) and documentary filmmaker Catherine (Cate Blanchett). The details of their relationship are buried in flashbacks involving a twentysomething Brit named Jonthan (Louis Partridge) on vacation in Italy, the details of which accumulate gradually, building to an emotionally devastating finale.

That said, there is a mid-story hump to Cuarón’s adaptation of Renee Knight’s novel, one that makes contextual sense once you reach the journey’s end but threatens to send some audiences scurrying away for the comfort of a more digestible two-hour flick. Consider this review its own kind of disclaimer: stick with it, because Cuarón’s work here is a shattering magic trick of serialized storytelling, engineered with the ambition and innovation of a true cinematic visionary.