There are two different TV shows in Disclaimer with two different sets of performances and two different tones. The show's fatal flaw is that this dichotomy fatally undermines it.
In the first show we have the tragic story of a middle class mother and father learning that their twenty-something son has died in an accident on the Italian coast. We see the Met police officers devastate their lives with the news, and the identification of the corpse. Lesley Manville (MRS HARRIS GOES TO PARIS) is stunning in the role of the grief-struck mother, with a rather outmatched Kevin Kline giving support as the father.
Twenty years later the mother has died but the father has stumbled upon his son's holiday photos showing a romance between him and a young mother. It turns out that his now deceased wife wrote a novelisation of what she believes happened on that holiday, and how her son died saving this young woman's toddler son. The presumption is that the young mother was a kind of desperate housewife, seducing the young man and then cruelly abandoning the scene of his death.
In the contemporary storyline the father (Kevin Kline) publishes the novel and sends it, as well as the explicit photos, to the now very successful middle-aged woman (Cate Blanchett) and her family. Just as Lesley Manville played the story straight, Cate Blanchett gives a deeply convincing portrait of a woman desperately scrambling to keep her luxurious and outwardly perfect life in tact. She is distraught when her own now twenty-something son reads the book and has a rather fraught relationship with him anyway. And the publication of the novel stirs up deep-seated resentments in her husband, who thinks she has put her career before being a mother.
So that's the serious story. It is well-acted by the two leading ladies, Manville and Blanchett, and beautifully staged. A scene with the two parents standing in the sea where their son died is particularly haunting. That said, the precisely curated on-trend luxury of the contemporary house that Blanchett's character lives in reminded me of the kind of miniseries that Nicole Kidman seems to relentlessly star in now. We were one bad blonde wig away from The Perfect Couple.
The problem is that there is a second TV show going on here. And it plays as bad comedy, I hope unintentionally. Casting Kevin Kline as the vengeful older father is a risk as he brings a mischief to every role. He needs to be an angel of torment but he comes off as Puck, complete with comedy gestures of throwing a bomb into Catherine's life. It's just tonally off. And as I said, in the flashback scenes he is utterly outmatched by Manville.
The bigger problem is casting Sacha Baron Cohen as Blanchett's jealous husband. He can't help but play the role a little bit bigger than necessary, and of course we as the audience bring our own baggage and expectations seeing him on screen. Maybe the performance won't play as bad on TV when people are watching at home. But in a packed Royal Festival Hall it took one or two people to start sniggering and pretty soon the audience was laughing out loud at his line readings.
Similarly, the audience was laughing at the scenes where the younger version of Blanchett, played by Leila George, is seducing the gap year student. It's unfortunate writing - and maybe it's this way in the book given that it's ultimately his mum's imagination? Which is also creepy AF. But anyways, it's the most cringe-inducing scene and poor Louis Partridge (ENOLA HOLMES) has to play a feckless boy who is the object of his own humiliation and our laughter. Like I said, maybe this is the point. Either way it was awful to watch and totally undermined the serious emotional work being done by Manville and Blanchett.
The final fatal blow to this TV series is the intrusive and ham-fisted voiceover from Kline, Blanchett and Baron Cohen's characters. The latter in particular is just laughably bad. None of them add anything to narrative propulsion. I gather that this is a feature of the novel but it simply does not translate to screen.
As I said, it may turn out that the literal incredible and laughable tone of the seduction scenes is the point. An imagined version of a past that has been hypothesised. But until the final episode revelations of whatever the truth is, we are stuck with some pretty unwatchable TV. I doubt many viewers will stay the course.
DISCLAIMER started airing on Apple TV today.
