Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking final plot twist in Disclaimer and now I have been relieved of a massive burden. No longer need I watch any more episodes of this weird, creepy, pretentious, contrived and prurient series just to see how it ends.
You find yourself hating everyone and everything in it – even the cat
On paper it all looks promising: based on a bestselling novel by Renée Knight (Lee Child says in a quote on the cover that it’s ‘exactly what a great thriller should be’); adapted and directed by fêted Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron; starry cast headed by Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, with a potentially intriguing appearance by Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) playing it completely straight as Cate’s cuckolded husband…
The problem is that even before the end of episode one, you find yourself hating everyone and everything in it. ‘Even the cat!’, said the Fawn. And it’s true. You do hate the cat. Though I’m quite sure in real life it is a perfectly affable creature, on screen it looks too much like a trained TV cat going through the motions for a handful of Scrumbles being offered just out of shot.
The cat’s stilted behaviour, however, is of a piece with the mood generally. Most of the cast, not just the ones from Australia or the US, speak English as if it were not their first language, perhaps out of misplaced respect for the Spanish-speaking director. It’s like watching a Pinter play on the BBC in the 1970s, only with a bigger budget and fancier settings. Am I meant to be unsettled or is this really lame and embarrassing – or maybe a bit of both?
Every scene, every location, feels almost there but not quite, and raises all sorts of awkward and possibly irrelevant questions. Why does the miserable, whiny son have his scuzzy digs right above the fashionable Café Lisboa? Should he not be more grateful than he apparently is to be enjoying such easy access to those yummy pasteis de nata? Why is that obviously world-class choral ensemble in Venice playing to only a handful of tourists? Is it really possible to take selfies through the telephoto lens of a Nikon camera? How come a pair of Interrailers on a student budget can afford to buy themselves their very own sleeper carriage in which to bonk freely (and annoyingly)?
This tonal uncertainty leaves you a bit rudderless. In the train scene, for example, the young couple come across as crass, philistine, shallow, chaotic, one-track-minded. But is this because the director is attempting, not altogether winningly, to capture the charming fecklessness of youth? Or is he signalling to us – via, for example, a somewhat grim tussle over the girl’s underwear on the train platform when she unexpectedly has to go home early – that there is a snake in the garden and that trouble lies ahead?
And what about the main character? Her name is Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) and she’s a top documentary maker who has just won a lifetime achievement award at one of those ghastly ceremonies where people sit at round tables getting drunk and bored and wishing they could escape. She lives with her grotesquely fawning husband (Baron Cohen) in an envy-inducing London house. But she has a dark secret.
The dark secret (it’s OK, I’m not telling you anything you don’t learn in the first episode) is that many years ago, while her husband was briefly absent and she was looking after their son at an Italian beach resort, she had a fling with that Interrail boy with the infuriating Nikon selfie habit. Unfortunately he died shortly afterwards.
Something similar happened to me once in Greece, except the woman was childless, I didn’t die and it was bloody brilliant. Had I died I like to think that my parents would have written to my seducer thanking her for having given me such a jolly send-off. But this being a dark, moody psychological thriller bearing no resemblance to real life, we are asked to believe that this boy’s now elderly and embittered father (Kline) has discovered the secret – from reading his late wife’s newly unearthed roman-à-clef – and wishes to both torment Ravenscroft and bring her to justice.
Partly for nostalgic reasons, I’m rooting for the older woman. There’s something very disturbing and vindictive about Kline’s character – the way his face comes over all Smeagol when he’s engineering his revenge. But I’m not going to get the satisfaction of being vindicated because I don’t think I can bear to watch any further.
Maybe you’ll feel differently. It might be your kind of book – and series. But it’s not mine. It seems to me a classic example of one of those high-concept thrillers, aimed especially, I suspect, at successful career women who secretly enjoy being made to feel guilty about having neglected their family. One in which plausibility and character development are subordinated to the mechanical twists and turns of the tortured plot. I didn’t believe any of it.
