‘Disclaimer’ Review: Episodes 3 and 4 Dig for Buried Truths in ‘Exquisite’ Fiction — Spoilers
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 3 (“III”) and Episode 4 (“IV”).]
Alfonso Cuarón frames the middle portion “Disclaimer” around suffering — who suffers, from what, and how it changes them. “You want to make him understand why you hadn’t told him,” Catherine’s narrator says early in Episode 3 (“III”). “It wasn’t for you. It was for them. For Robert, but mainly for Nicholas. Your silence had been to protect your son, and Jonathan’s death had sealed it. There had been no need for anyone else to suffer.”
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Of course, need and suffering rarely go hand in hand. Few people need to suffer, but suffering nonetheless imposes itself on people without invitation. Stephen (Kevin Kline) and Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville) are two such people, and their journey across “Disclaimer” Episodes 3 and 4 is one of escalating pain, frustration, and seclusion. Catherine, too, is shown struggling. Her woeful present is motivated by the Brigstockes’ anguished past, and setting each timeline side-by-side in these episodes can make for a rough two hours of television — their overwhelming grief interrupted only by graphic sex scenes and Robert’s increasingly indignant reaction to them.
Catherine (Cate Blanchett) didn’t intend for any of this. She didn’t want anyone to read the book. She certainly didn’t want her husband to dissect it without her contributing voice. And even if, as she tells Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) in a moment of piercing honesty, she “wanted [Jonathan] to die” on that beach, all those years ago, she doesn’t appear to be caught in the middle of a two-decade long crusade against the Brigstocke family. She doesn’t seem to have thought of Jonathan’s parents much at all. Yes, she met with Nancy once for coffee (as seen in Episode 2), but she seemed to be as confused by what Jonathan’s mother wanted back then as she is by what his father wants now.
“It’s an exquisite work of fiction,” she says to Stephen’s answering machine about Nancy’s novel, “The Perfect Stranger.” “There’s a pain at the heart of this book that is undeniable.” With that, Catherine thinks she’s put an end to it; that all this sad old man needed was her acknowledgement, and, having given it, she can go about explaining her side of things to Robert (and Nicholas, if needed), and Stephen can move on with his life, however that may be.
But Catherine underestimates Stephen’s suffering, which is already evident to viewers. (We saw so much of his ire last week and see even more detailed explanations for it now). Cuarón underlines Catherine’s comical overconfidence by cutting from her self-satisfied voicemail to Stephen’s furious, frozen stare. “The devil had knocked at my door,” he narrates, still holding the yet-bitten sandwich made from his late wife’s expired ingredients (or his expired wife’s late ingredients?). Rather than put him off, Catherine has spurred him on, and in case it wasn’t clear why, flashback after flashback to Stephen’s final years with Nancy underline each tragedy fueling his vengeance (while simultaneously doling out clues to what really happened between Jonathan and Catherine).
Stephen
In a fitting if obvious visual device, the opening flashback depicting Stephen and Nancy being informed of their son’s death also fixates on, of all things, the weather. Relaxing in their backyard on a sunny day — Stephen grilling, Nancy reading — it’s as though storm clouds come rolling in the second they answer the door. Two police officers tell them of Jonathan’s fate. He’s dead. He drowned. They’re quite sure it’s him, but they still need Stephen and Nancy to travel to Venice and identify their son’s corpse. Considering how pale both parents turn over the course of the visit, one would be forgiven for not noticing their lighting shifts, as well. Slowly, the sun outside is covered by clouds. The living room turns an ashen, eerie gray, and the final shot — of an ear of corn burning on the grill — brings us back to the vision of Stephen’s life we saw last week, one befitting a couple whose world has gone dark.
Stephen’s story is told with less narration this week. Much of Episode 3, especially, seems respectfully removed from his dour point of view — not separate, but there’s less of Stephen, and more of Nancy, more from the Italian officials, and, quite notably, more kids. The morning they find out Jonathan is dead, there are children jumping on a trampoline next door. When they’re sitting in the Venice airport, waiting to be escorted to the morgue, children are running and playing all around them. It continues outside, when Jonathan narrates, “The sun was shining as if nothing terrible had happened.” Given its thematic prominence in these episodes, Caurón wants us thinking about the weather, but it’s also clear Stephen and Nancy are going to be haunted by kids, wherever they go.
Or don’t go. After their trip to Italy (which ends with them standing in the ocean, waves crashing into their waists, a literal storm approaching on the horizon), the Brigstockes steadily entomb themselves in their home. Nancy stops working. At one point, she tries to drown herself (claiming she was just trying to “know what he felt,” not end her own life). Later, around the time she’s diagnosed with cancer, she moves into Jonathan’s old room. There, she types the book causing so much havoc in the present day, and it’s there, we assume, she died.
There are a number of questions raised during Stephen’s scenes in Episodes 3-4. Mainly, what he’s going to do with that secret social media account, but it’s also curious when Stephen questions why Jonathan would risk his own life to save a drowning child, since he can’t remember a time when his son put anyone else’s needs ahead of his own: “Was it just reckless impulsiveness?” But the flashbacks are treated with such detachment, it’s hard not to accept them as the truth. He observes Nancy’s passionate anger more than he participates in it himself, and in doing so, apparently provides a more objective window into the past — a window we need to better understand the Brigstockes. Later, he’ll get riled up and turn nasty, at which point his bias starts to affect our perception of things. But for most of this week, Stephen’s memories seem to be on solid ground.
Trust Level: 7/10
Catherine
In trying to avoid suffering, Catherine experiences it with acute swiftness — like a screen door you think you’ve propped open that suddenly swings back to smack you in the face. With Stephen, she thinks her voicemail — her acknowledgement — will pacify him, which makes it all the more jarring when she visits her local bookshop and finds dozens of copies of “The Perfect Stranger” on display. A place where she was once admired, a place she went seeking reprieve from her worries, has been contaminated.
The fawning bookstore owner has already read it, calling Catherine’s literary interpretation an “awful, awful female character.” That’s enough to send her into a panic, scurrying out of the store without her ordered books. First, she crashes into an extremely rude old man, whose crass words — “Be careful you clumsy bitch” — serve as an accidental, unheeded warning. Catherine walks blindly into the street, right in front of a speeding taxi, which screeches to a stop but still sends her spinning. (The unbroken take implies Blanchett did her own stunt here? That’s a lot of trust to put in a set of brakes!)
Catherine was aware, at least, to expect trouble from Robert. It’s why, her narration tells us, she stopped at the bookstore to begin with. (“You’re afraid of what could be waiting for you at home.”) But I doubt anyone could’ve expected such ruthless treatment. Watching soccer with their son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Robert has a lie all cooked up that allows him to kick Catherine out of their house without so much as a conversation: Mom is going out of town for a while to cover a story. He already packed her bag, and he’ll call a taxi to make sure makes her flight.
Damn. If Catherine were to protest, she’d have to admit to Nicholas that the book he’s already read — and the woman he already hates within it — is based on her. Clearly, it’s an admission she doesn’t want to make, though what, exactly, Catherine has to say about what happened in Venice remains unknown. “Disclaimer” has repeatedly shut down any attempt to hear her side of the story, whether it’s Robert jumping to assumptions and shutting her out, or Catherine’s own panicked, pained speechlessness in the moment. Kicking her out of the house is the most blatant means yet of not hearing her out, and we have to wonder how much longer she’ll stand for it.
Trust Level: 6/10
Jonathan
Instead of hearing from Catherine in the present, we see quite a lot of Catherine in the past. But now that we know Jonathan’s Italian vacation are scenes stem from the book, “The Perfect Stranger,” it’s safe to assume very little of what Catherine says and does in these scenes is verifiably true. Instead, they’re depictions what Nancy thinks of her, based on whatever she was able to learn about her son while she was still alive.
So… why did Jonathan’s mom spend so many of those pages imagining her son’s sex life in explicit detail? It’s hard to say, but — and this is dangerous territory, given how “Disclaimer” discourages independent theorizing — there are a few moments that could explain Nancy’s perspective. First and foremost: the pictures. She found the photos her son took of Catherine, she knew Sasha (Liv Hill), his girlfriend at the time, wasn’t with him when he died, and she made the reasonable assumption that Jonathan and Catherine struck up an affair.
Also, as we see when Nancy and Stephen arrive at the beach where their son died, she’s immediately upset that Catherine left town already. Did her initial impression of Catherine cloud her judgment of her going forward? Did it permanently paint her as careless, selfish woman in Nancy’s mind? Later on, when she met with Catherine at the coffee shop, all she found out was that Catherine did know her son (despite telling the police she’d never met him), and her reluctance to share more only fueled Nancy’s established beliefs. A married woman of merit wouldn’t want to admit to sleeping with a teenager behind her husband’s back, especially while watching over her 4-year-old son. She must be embarrassed about her behavior and eager to cover-up her affair.
But acknowledging the affair is one thing, but intimately chronicling their coupling is another. So… why did Jonathan’s mom spend so much time imagining her son’s sex life in explicit detail? One thing we know about Nancy is that she wanted Jonathan to be happy. She simulated his death by drowning because the authorities told her he wasn’t in any pain, and Nancy wanted to make sure that was true. That’s how desperate she was to believe her son’s final minutes alive weren’t spent in agony, so it makes sense that she would hope his final hours and days were even better. Nancy liked remembering her son as his best self, which is likely why the last trip of his life is an idyllic visit filled with laughter, artistic fulfillment (so many fancy photos), and, yes, lots and lots of sex. He’s a young man. Young men are sexually voracious. So she assumed her son was, too.
But how their affair unfolds in the book is also important, knowing it unfolds as Nancy sees fit. Catherine, for instance, is the initial aggressor. Her flirtation with Jonathan (if you can even call it that) is so overt, so persistent, so overwhelming that her son is essentially powerless in front of her. Anyone reading this version of events would be hard-pressed to blame Jonathan for cheating on his girlfriend — not when she left him in Venice, all alone, primed for the picking by this borderline predator.
Nancy’s perspective dictating these scenes also helps explain why Jonathan is such a boyish simp. Throughout their extended romps in the hay, Jonathan is repeatedly seen as a gawking, gobsmacked, dolt. He’s like a kid in a candy store, emphasis on “kid.” Catherine constantly instructs him, she’s constantly in charge, and she constantly takes (and gives) whatever she wants. She’s not a woman swept away by a chivalrous, charming stranger. She’s not a character in a romance novel. She’s not even particularly invested in Jonathan, which becomes all the more glaring when she tries to end it, he refuses, and — scared about her husband finding out — she stays silent as he drowns in the open ocean. Catherine is a femme fatale, and Jonathan is her unwitting prey.
As “Disclaimer” continues, in addition to remembering how little of Catherine’s own perspective is substantiated in scenes from the book, it also seems important to remember that Nancy wrote it while in immense physical and psychological pain. Stephen says her mind “shattered” after Jonathan’s death. Then the cancer struck. Each scene we get of Nancy shows her trapped by her grief, whether she’s smiling at newly discovered photos taken by Jonathan or being buried next to her son in a plot that was meant for her husband.
Hurt people hurt people. And Nancy continues to do damage from beyond the grave. When it comes to Catherine, she couldn’t see past herself: One mother went on to live a successful life with her son, while the other mother died bitter, alone, and suffering. Always suffering.
Trust Level: 2/10
Robert
My god, Robert sucks. I mean, getting hammered and passing out in your car is one thing. I’ll even let slide the comfort he takes at work from letting his employees do the actual work while he sits and stews over his wife’s perceived infidelity. (This line, though — “Robert is aware of the charity’s wrongdoings, but he needs to create a narrative that the law can support” — that’s a slight that lasts.) But kicking Catherine out of the house is ice cold, and spending so much time in Robert’s bitter, broiling brain isn’t doing the man any favors.
Reading the book, Robert feels “deceived” by Catherine — as if she’s been hiding this passionate sex machine from him, and saving that side of her self for someone else. “She is a woman who’s always gotten her own way, always done as she pleased,” he thinks later. Later, he even wonders if Catherine blames Nicholas for “her lover’s death,” and that’s what’s soiled their relationship. Imagine being married to someone, promising you’ll always have their back, and then leaping to such vile conclusions based entirely on what other people have said. No matter what your partner did or didn’t do, you’d still be a monster, and “Disclaimer” isn’t trying very hard to hide this perception of Robert.
Trust Level: 1/10
Grade: B-
“Disclaimer” is available on Apple TV+. Episode 5 will be released Friday, October 25, with the final two episodes released weekly through the finale on November 8.
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