‘Disclaimer’ Finale: Alfonso Cuarón on Peeling Back the Layers of Truth
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 7 (“VII”).]
“Shut up, I’m talking,” demands Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), sharply halting Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) and his revenge narrative. Marked by her slapping Stephen at the end of Episode 6, it is finally time for Catherine to share her version of events, except the recounting of those haunting two days isn’t as easy as one would expect for a renowned journalist played by an erudite Blanchett. She trips over words, her recall of the dramatic events (including her rape and near drowning of her son) are out of order, and the images have the fleeting quality of memory and are often not grounded in sound. When “Disclaimer” creator Alfonso Cuarón was on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast, he credited this approach to his star.
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“Cate did so much research about the consequences of a trauma like this, and part of the thing is the impossibility of talking, how difficult it is to articulate that past,” said Cuarón who wrote and directed the episode. “She was very adamant about how we were going to portray that past. It cannot be fully articulated. That’s a reason, for instance, the way in which she’s telling the events is not necessarily linear.”
Cuarón is clear that Catherine’s memory is our best version of the truth, the imperfect recall of someone who has experienced trauma. Like each of the other narrative lines, these flashbacks are given a distinct visual perspective, which Cuarón described as being “obsessively in the point-of-view of Catherine,” designed to signal the unfiltered, first-hand account of what she experienced.
“If you see there’s a lot of shots over her shoulder, and it’s more what she looks at than actually looking at her because that’s how you remember things,” said Cuarón. “You’re not looking at yourself, you’re looking at the elements, so she can see maybe her hand and in the mirror in the background, the reflection she sees of herself.”
The thesis of “Disclaimer” is the ability of narrative and form to manipulate, something the series itself does by moving between its different narrative timelines and points of view. But for Cuarón there were rules, it couldn’t simply be misdirection, the pieces needed to fit together.
“We were very concerned, and particularly Cate was very concerned, about not having a false note. It was about not tricking the audience,” said Cuarón. “In other words, to present everything in a way that if you see the whole thing again you see an eloquence, you have a different understanding of every single motivation and gestures of each one of the characters. It’s not that we are playing games and tricking [people].”
To Cuarón’s point, the events of Episode 7 reward rewatching Episode 5 and Catherine’s failure to defend herself. Catherine is visibly flustered when her colleagues demand a response to Stephen’s accusations and question her investigation of him. At that point in “Disclaimer,” Blanchett’s performance can read as having been caught off guard when confronted by a truth she long tried to bury, mixed with the arrogance of having her professional ethics questioned by those she considers professionally inferior. But when replayed through the lens of the finale, it is clear Blanchett’s performance and actions aren’t those of someone guilty, but experiencing the inability to talk about past trauma — she doesn’t try to tell people the truth because she is seemingly incapable of it.
While on the podcast, Cuarón discussed how production stretched over a year. There were a variety of causes, including COVID, but one of the biggest was how the carefully balanced narrative, with its interlocking pieces and timelines, were constantly being reconfigured. While Cuarón took months writing all the episodes well ahead of production, he admitted he didn’t always see the forest through the trees, and he had a producer and star in Blanchett who was constantly interrogating the material and pushing him to make the pieces fit perfectly.
“[Cate] comes with a magnifying glass, and starts seeking for inconsistencies — dramatic ones, emotional ones, stuff that says you are cheating the audience,” said Cuarón. “It was very rigorous, all of that work, and it’s like you’re taking away one piece, so it was about how we need to reconstruct the clock now without that piece. And it was a process that kept on going pretty much all the way to the end.”
A good example of this was rewriting the entire last episode, starting with Catherine confronting Stephen in his kitchen.
“There was a narrative of what was happening in the past that is still in there, but it was more elliptical, and it was Cate who said, ‘No, this is cheating because this scene is happening in real-time,’” said Cuaron. “Originally, I thought I’m going to just shoot the moments that I need in the kitchen because we’re going back into the flashbacks, and Cate says, ‘No, we cannot do that. We need to shoot the whole conversation from the get-go in the kitchen, and then you can select the moments in which you’re going to go into flashbacks.’ That forced a whole rewrite because suddenly I realized that I was kind of cheating between one thing to the other, making it maybe too elliptical, or I was evading certain moments.”
Writing an entire kitchen confrontation was significant, and shooting it took a toll on Blanchett and Kline as performers, but it was more than just new additional dialogue.
“It affected so much the structure of that whole last hour. It affected what we were going to see in the past, what we actually see her saying before going visually into other places,” said Cuaron. “It was a whole puzzle that was ongoing, but most of the changes were thanks to Cate’s collaboration.”
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