Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week, which is going to make it hard to post. But I didn’t want to leave you high and dry so I thought I’d quickly share my thoughts on Alfonso Cuarón’s high-production foray into TV, Disclaimer.
Cuarón likes to bounce back (Roma) and forth (Gravity) between low and high budget faire. He is the filmmaker’s filmmaker, the kind of guy you would imagine drags a Panovision camera over to the local coffee shop JUST IN CASE he sees a magical shot he could use in his next movie.
So it was shocking that Cuarón finally made the plunge into television. These film purists haaaaate TV. They think it’s evil. They think it latches onto your inner intestines and slowly nibbles away until there’s nothing left of you but a shell. Cuarón making a TV show is only one director removed from Christopher Nolan doing TV. Considering Nolan would rather fry his eyes inside an industrial sized Mumbai frier before doing TV, that’s a big deal.
Disclaimer is about a very successful journalist, Catherine, who, one day, receives a bunch of photos of her younger self in very sexual positions. Over the course of the story, we learn that, 20 years ago, while she was on holiday with her husband and son, she engaged in a secret intense sexual fling with a young man on the trip.
The next day, due to her negligence, her son ended up on an inflatable boat way out in the water (her husband had to return home early so he wasn’t there). Her lover swam out to save the boy but drowned in the process. Catherine was happy because it meant she could completely bury what happened. There’d be no trace of any relationship.
However, the boy’s parents not only found out what happened, the mother wrote a book about it which the father later published (after the wife’s death). The book focuses on just how awful this woman is. With the book and pictures out there, our dirty debutante must try and clear up the mess before her reputation is ruined forever.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that wanted to be seen as genius more than this one. Even if we’re only going off the cinematography, this is true. 99.9% of the shots are at magic hour. That may seem trivial but if you’re only shooting at magic hour, that means you are spending a lot of time during the day NOT SHOOTING. Which is expensive. That alone tells you how great Cuarón wanted this to be.
The problem is the same problem with all these “tweeners.” Which is that we’re dealing with a half-movie half-show. It never becomes one or the other. In refusing to do so, we’re never sure what to make of what we’re watching. It really does feel like an odd beast.
But I think the real problem is the characters. There wasn’t one character that worked. Catherine, the lead, was too passive and weak. Stephen, the father of the kid who was killed, was too weird. The guy wore his dead wife’s too-small pink sweater everywhere, like some deranged, but more accessible, version of Buffalo Bill. Catherine’s husband was so spineless you were begging for his scenes to end the second he showed up on screen. Their son was so melodramatic (drug addict, always mad) he didn’t even need to be in the show since we ALWAYS KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS GOING TO DO.
The only part of the series that kind of worked were the flashbacks to Young Catherine and her lover. Both those actors were strong. They had great chemistry. There was actual tension when they were onscreen. This is the rare instance when I admit that the flashbacks in a story actually helped it. But that’s at least partly due to the fact that everything in the present was so overwrought, making you beg to be anywhere but there.
I can’t believe I made it through the whole series. (spoilers) To be honest, the only reason I kept going was because I heard there was a whopper of a twist. And, to the show’s credit, the twist is pretty shocking. Even more shocking is that we wonder if the final development was the truth… or a lie. But could it make up for 7 episodes so determined to win awards that I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuarón’s crew submitted the series not just for this year’s Emmy’s, but for every Emmy’s through 2034? It couldn’t.
It’s not a bad show. It’s just not as good as it wants to be. And, sometimes, that’s worse than being a bad show.
What did you think?
