[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 7 (“VII”) — the series finale — including its ending. For further coverage, read IndieWire’s episode reviews and spoiler-free full-season review.]
The first half of the “Disclaimer” finale dedicates itself entirely to Catherine (Cate Blanchett) — her story, from her point of view, in the way she wants to tell it — and, fittingly for a series as meticulously constructed as one would expect from writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, the very first sentence she speaks works as both ominous foreshadowing for the revelations to come, as well as a useful complement to last week’s opening line. Then, she started by saying, “The truth is,” and now, she starts by referring to Jonathan (Louis Partridge) as “the stranger.” Via voiceover, she says, “As soon as I got back to my room, the stranger immediately disappeared from my mind.” For Catherine, that’s all he was: an unknown man whose formal identity she only learned in death, and whose innermost monster she discovered the night prior.
“The truth is [Jonathan] is a stranger.”
The Jonathan we meet in Episode 7 is exactly that. Gone is the “gawking, gobsmacked, dolt” imagined in the pages of “The Perfect Stranger.” This Jonathan isn’t a foolish young man preyed upon by an aggressive older woman. He’s the aggressor; a violent, troubled assailant who enters Catherine’s hotel room uninvited, forces her to pose for his lurid pictures, and then rapes her until he’s too tired to go on. Credit to Partridge, the actor, for nimbly portraying two opposite versions of Jonathan, but even in our relatively brief window with the latter embodiment, it’s clear the “stranger” is the real Jonathan — a critical concession to match the story’s horrifying reveal.
In a series meant to make you wary of rendering definitive verdicts, Episode 7 (“VII”) excises many of the dubious narrative techniques deployed earlier. Cuarón wants to be clear about what happened, not only for the series’ message to land, but also to highlight the narrative trickery he warned us about from the start.
Once again, Catherine provides her own voiceover to the Italian flashbacks. Blanchett speaks for her character, and she does so in first-person — instead of Indira Varma, Catherine’s previous narrator, who used second-person and only reemerges in the finale during the closing epilogue (when she speaks in definitive third-person about Catherine, Robert, and Nicholas). The images in Catherine’s telling are stark and clear, lacking the stylization seen elsewhere, and there are answers provided to each question her explanation brings up. Once “Disclaimer” is ready to unveil the truth, it discards any obstacles to Catherine’s veracity.
But Stephen (Kevin Kline), too, helps dispel any doubts. It’s evident the stranger Catherine describes is not a stranger to his father. Not entirely. Although Stephen’s initial reaction to Catherine’s story is denial, it’s apparent from the way he takes in her words that there’s substance to them. Stephen’s expression (masterfully contorted by Kline) is of restrained disgust, irrepressibly shifting between targets. Sometimes he can reject Catherine’s claims and maintain his revulsion toward her, the woman who ruined his life. But then she mentions a detail about his son, like Jonathan’s aftershave, or a loss too haunting to be fabricated, like the “forensic evidence” she offers as proof, and then Stephen’s conviction, his hatred, it fades. His face opens up. His eyes widen. His mind stops desperately searching for holes in her story, and his attention shifts ever so slightly, against his will, to consider if his son could’ve done what he did.
Once suspicion pushes open the door, there’s no stopping credence from taking root inside. I think Catherine convinced Stephen right then and there, at the Brigstockes’ kitchen table, that she’s telling the truth, and it’s only a suffering father’s prior actions that drive the finale’s climactic sprint. (Narratively, that is — being a TV show, the series also demands a more visceral, visual climax than two people talking at a table.) Catherine’s collapse reminds Stephen of the plan he’s hastily concocted (poisoning her tea with sleeping pills), and his dwindling desire for revenge sends him all the way to the hospital, up to Nicholas’ bed, and within a few inches of plunging the fateful needle into the near-comatose kid’s feeding tube.
What stops him, in the moment, is Nicholas mistaking Stephen for his mother. “Mum,” Nicholas says, his eyes still closed, sensing a parental figure nearby. “Mum, I want to go.” Had Catherine not successfully planted the seeds of uncertainty in Stephen, his all-consuming quest for vengeance could’ve had him believe Nicholas’ words meant the once-suicidal young man was asking to be put out of his misery. Instead, Stephen only hears a boy calling out for his mother. A child asking for help. A son, crying. As if woken from a nightmare and entering an unwelcome reality, Stephen pulls back, puts the syringe away, and weeps.
In the end, what are we to make of Stephen? He is, at once, intended to be a real character; a man driven over the edge by grief, who executes a dastardly (and rather complicated) revenge plot on an innocent woman. At the same time, he’s meant to embody an entire culture’s rush to judgment: how easy it can be to assume the worst of people, especially women accused of anything unladylike, and especially mothers accused of putting their own wants ahead of their children’s. Characters whose actions are driven by figurative demands more than literal motivations can seem unrealistic, and I don’t blame anyone who found Stephen too cartoonishly evil or his plan too convenient in coming together. But I think Kline’s performance exquisitely marries his character’s intimate and figurative halves, just as I feel the point being made through Stephen is worth his journey’s hurdles.
In an interview with IndieWire, Cuarón was quick to point out what “Disclaimer” is and isn’t about.
“We didn’t want to make it about [cancel culture] because it’s not about it — I mean, it’s not at the end,” Cuarón said. “This whole situation in many ways relates more [to] ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ for instance, in which a lot of people are very ready to make a judgment, but also this satisfaction of the righteousness. […] Once you have that, there’s a satisfaction, there’s a moral superiority about that, and I think that’s more of the point than cancel culture by itself.”
In terms of explaining society’s modern means of assessing everyone from public figures to next-door neighbors, “the satisfaction of righteousness” is a phrase that strikes me as particularly telling. Catherine’s co-workers aren’t just eager to hold her accountable for any wrongdoing; they’re eager to show everyone how plainly right they are for exposing a predator. (Remember when she said they could’ve talked to her privately, instead of putting on a show for the office?) Robert (Sacha Baron-Coehn) is so eager to be seen as the good parent (a role he’s always relished, at the expense of his wife’s relationship with Nicholas) that he distances himself from Catherine and apologizes to her accuser at the first whiff of impropriety. Even Stephen, whose lust for payback so often trumps his need to justify it, is able to look past his qualms about what really happened because he’s acting on behalf of his loved ones. He’s carrying out what they would have wanted. He’s doing what’s right by his dead wife and son. All that spoils his dastardly mission is the realization that he won’t get any satisfaction from it, once the truth becomes too obvious to ignore.
Later, after explaining what happened to Robert (Sacha Baron-Cohen) and dazedly apologizing to Catherine (who, quite understandably, misconstrues his ill-timed concession as an expression of remorse for killing her son), Stephen’s newfound clarity allows him to spot a long-overlooked detail: In one of Jonathan’s photographs of Catherine, a five-year-old Nicholas is standing there, watching. The boy did see what happened to his mother, and even though he can’t remember it (as Nicholas says again in the series’ closing moments), witnessing such confounding horrors at such a young age plainly affected him and his relationship with Catherine.
In what ways did those scarring memories, quickly repressed, shape Nicholas’ perception of his mother? He suffered two traumatic events in a matter of hours, and Catherine may spend the rest of her life wondering how they shaped him, but one thing is hard to dispute: They did shape him. Twice, he was scared. Twice, he was made to feel alone. Twice, his mom couldn’t help him. Kids aren’t supposed to realize the limits of their parents’ protection when they’re still unable to protect themselves. Nicholas faced that fear and promptly buried it, but our deepest anxieties always find a way to come out. For Nicholas, being afraid shifted into being angry. Feeling alone shifted into a lonely existence. And his mother has always been at the center — of his hostilities, of his isolation, of his life.
Now, with memories of the past surfaced in the present, the truth helps them heal. Right and wrong are set aside as they see and hear each other, as they listen rather than rush to judgment, as they try to understand instead of presuming to know better. In the last shot of the series, Catherine and Nicholas are physically and emotionally closer than they’ve been since her attack, and “Disclaimer” ends on a much-needed note of grace: mother and son, reconnecting. The stranger is gone. All that remains is the bright, white light of truth.
Grade: A-
“Disclaimer” is available in its entirety on Apple TV+.
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