When Cuarón went off-key
Say it ain't so, Alfonso
Who watches a perfect film and thinks, ‘That was great but it should’ve been 20 hours longer?’ Such is the bind for your modern filmmaker in the age of streaming giants: stories best told in 90-120 minutes get inflated to TV-series-length, only for the first downtick in viewing figures to spook the giants who pop the bubble and cancel the series.
Into this swamp wades Alfonso Cuarón, buoyed with every filmmaker credential: world cinema darling, franchise dab-hand, bagger of three Oscars. He was gonna break the bind with his Disclaimer, a self-contained miniseries which he himself prefers to call a seven-hour film. Time was you’d need Soyuzkino to grant you that run-time; now we have Apple TV. Their clout and Cuarón’s combined drew fellow Oscarites Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline to the sort of prestige TV-event that’s meant to justify the eclipse of the film industry. What it might have done instead is, à la Disclaimer, expose a side of Cuarón he’d prefer went unnoticed.
I write this as someone who’s watched his Children of Men so often I see it as less a cautionary tale, whose caution we clearly threw to the wind with our migrant hatred and global pandemic and slide into Cruel Britannia, than a discomfort blanket.1 Post-imperial ‘cosy apocalypses’ came from that part of the British psyche that suspects a weekend break is gonna fail then sniffs in satisfaction when it does, that actually likes being ill, that longs for its slippers and gown and the driving hand on the shoulder, to, thank God, just be put to bed. Now you’d hardly call the things-falling-apart of Children of Men cosy, but on its release, a short while after quite a millenarian turn of the millennium, it felt, like Goldilocks with a death drive would say, just right. A couple of years later the economy collapsed.2
Meanwhile Cuarón’s Gravity is my levity, a film whose fun lies in proving Walter Benjamin’s point about optical unconsciousness, and best of all via a partly imaginary camera: the sight of a barrel-rolling astronaut that becomes the centred point of view of a barrel-rolling starscape, the procession from Earth as pale-blue-dot to the juddering descent through its atmosphere: who knew looking could look like this? Bar a couple of shots of Sandra Bullock’s lifeboat tumbling apart on re-entry, the film is visually impeccable a decade on.3
As someone whose spatial awareness ranks below Roomba, the more I read about the making of Gravity, the more I come out in hives at the stress of its technical challenges: working out the geometry and optics in every shot, real and CGI. (Imagine having to hook a ring with a pole that’s 100ft long; imagine the pole’s connected to a thousand others; now imagine you have to hook those rings with those poles a hundred times a day.) Cuarón deserves Méliès-level recognition for his boost to movie mechanics. While we’re at it, he did the one good Harry Potter.
So would that I could unhear the false notes that clang otherwise through his films!
In Children of Men its the speeches. The film gives one to most main characters, almost every one abrupt. Pam Ferris (Nurse Trunchbull by the way) does her speech, AKA The Day the Children’s Laughter Died, apropos something, considering the infertility conceit of the film and her being next to a derelict playground, but without motivation in the scene with the film’s hero Clive Owen. One-upping her, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s gives Owen his speech, AKA Int kids brilliant?, in the middle of a firefight. They’re like The League of Gentlemen’s spoof of northern plays where Mark Gatiss asks, “Can I do a speech? Can I? I will then.” The kinder way to read them is they’re a pattern, that Cuarón was being theatrical, that they’re meant to be Shakespearean—but then I wish that he’d gone full Peter Brook and done them in voiceover. And that he’d muted altogether Julianne Moore waxing about “keta-mean” and Clive Owen coughing at weed with a “Fuck, that’s strong” like certain other try-hard boasts about going to “munchie city.”
The speeches’ writing is fine, the acting fine, even their placement is only an accessory in pomping up the film’s tone. Children of Men is famous for its precisely executed, gut-seizing set-pieces: the road ambush, the rolling car-start, the entry to Bexhill and its uprising. Without the same precision put into executing the speeches - their on and off-ramps, when, where and with whom they should go as well as how - they end up grandstanding and so sound hollow. As in music, any tone by itself is neutral: it’s the intervals, the relations that matter, that make things chime or sound off.
Now you might think Gravity in any of its non-spectacular moments would suffer from the same clangles. After the adrift Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gets back into a space capsule and sheds her spacesuit, she floats in zero-g into a foetal position, complete with a spacesuit-tether umbilical. Yes a director’s job is to direct our attention but did Cuarón, some critics sniped, have to move us quite so firmly by the head with the shot’s centre-framing and slow-mo? It wasn’t so much on the nose as all over the face.
But here the interrelations, the intervals - the necessity, in such a frantic film, of pauses - keep the tone in key. Those critics failed to at least nestle the womb shot within its imagery pattern. Before it, Ryan has a scene reliving a moment from her past when she tells George Clooney’s character about her dead kid. After it, she goes beast-mode: salvaging her failed SOS to some Inuits on ham radio by howling along to their dogs. Then after the reborn Stone has fallen out of the sky, the film frames her from an extreme low angle as she regains her ***gravity*** on what must be Earth but is presented, all dragonflies and green lagoons, as though it’s the ancient past or another planet. (My first time round I thought it was gonna do the twist from the Planet of the Apes novel.) The film having kicked off with the chain reaction wipeout of our satellites (“America just lost Facebook”- hooray), the pattern of regressions - to the womb, to animality, to ‘prehistoric’ Earth - implies a regression for humanity to a pre-tech world, ironic for all the tech that went into the making of the film, though no more ironic than the same message in 2001: A Space Odyssey (where to be more accurate it was a call to go post-tech).
That Cuarón can struggle with getting the tone just right - I’ve not even mentioned his precious A Little Princess - seems obvious when you reconsider films of his when he’s truly on song: Y tu mamá también, Roma. Then again, it seems too obvious to put the difference between them and his non-Spanish-language films down to cross-cultural interference. Yet Disclaimer, his latest work in English, doesn’t even the score.
Its drug chat notwithstanding, Children of Men bared the Id of England so well I welcomed the news Cuarón’s next film (even a seven-hour one) would again be set here. And with it being set too at the heady heights and spiteful depths of what already sounds old-fashioned to call cancel culture, I relished the thought of what he might dredge out of us this time. Encouraging that relish was the horror-movie-style font of its title card, DIS, CLAI, and MER, stacked vertically. So too there are three levels to the miniseries or let’s call it the maxifilm, though we only get to the third in the last episode…
The first is a modern-day London storyline in which Cate Blanchett’s character Catherine, a famous video documentarian, receives a vanity-published book in the post seemingly about her past. The second level is that past as relayed in the book, in which a younger Catherine cheats on her husband with a just-about young man, Jonathan, while on holiday. Following their athletic affair he drowns trying to save her infant son, in criminally negligent circumstances if we’re to believe the book’s author, Jonathan’s grieving mother, played by Leslie Manville.4
The modern-day London storyline is shot in pastel or charcoal washed-out HD, while the Italian holiday past is warmer with old-fashioned pinhole fade-outs—this because Disclaimer has a different cinematographer for each level, Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel. Together they lull you into thinking Apple’s getting enough cinematic bang for its buck. What it made me think was how sight lines in theatres used to be centred on the point of view of the highest-ranking toff if not the monarch in the audience, screw everyone else: so too Disclaimer is broadcast at an image quality and apportioned sound mix that only come out for those who have the most high-end home cinema set-up (and who’ve been arsed to correctly set them up).
The stress on technicalities is accompanied by over- and underemphases elsewhere, like someone saying the right words with the intonation all wrong. Had Cuarón not spread himself seven-hours too thin, we might not have noticed what sounded off, or anyway noticed less often. Everything from Kevin Kline’s English accent - he sounds like he took ‘speaks with a plum in his mouth’ literally - to the performance of who they cast as Catherine’s jealous husband (not the best idea to give the man who played Borat a part where he’ll always be saying, ‘My wife!’), through to their characters’ surname, Ravenscroft, so archly literary it would better suit a suspect in a live-action murder mystery experience.
One level up (or down, depending on your final perspective on the story) is the holiday section, with sex scenes so in-your-crotch you wonder they weren’t meant as a snitty backlash at the assumed prudishness of modern young audiences. The intimate coordination of the Sloanily good-looking actors Louis Partridge and Leila George over several episodes becomes malcoordinated at such dialogue as his “You’re like a sex Yoda!” Barely plausible for a gap-year-kid in the 90s, less so for a depiction by his middle-aged mum of what she thinks happened to him.
It’s this device of her book that is the maxifilm’s falsest note. Inspired by saucy holiday snaps of the younger Catherine that she found among her son’s personal effects, as they’re called only in death, it’s published by her widower and further publicised by him to get his revenge on Catherine whom he and his wife blamed for their son’s death. Would finding nude pics inspire your mum to write what this section depicts as a Cosmo-style letter from a reader about her summer shagfest?
Worse is the idea a vanity-press publication, printed in floppy soft-cover, would take the British reading public by storm. Delivered to London bookshops by hand by an increasingly disheveled Kevin Kline, it’s nevertheless a succès de scandale with everyone; even Blanchett’s teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) reads it, when he’s not otherwise off his tits on non-specific hard drugs or busy cyber-sexting, albeit inadvertently with an old man (everyone on the internet is really Kevin Kline).
But the worst of the book is not a misstep but a missed chance. There shouldn’t have been any book within the TV miniseries in the first place. It should’ve been a short film within the maxifilm (after all, Blanchett herself plays a video documentarian—why not have Kline and Manville accuse her on YouTube). Instead the maxifilm wears its literary pretensions (and predecessor) on its tailored sleeve, so that all seven hours of it are narrated by a po-voiced Indira Varma, almost all the narration superfluous to what we see on screen. On top of that, all in the second person.5
The ‘You’ is Catherine, half Cate Blanchett’s role, as well acted onscreen as it is tasteless in conception by the end. Having played every other variation on the debauched age-gap theme, from Notes on a Scandal to Tár, she only really had one slot left. Because after we get to Disclaimer’s third level there is a twist.
Torquing what has come before as it does, it’s not hard to see coming. In any case, you’ll be let in on it early by the last episode’s prefatory content warning, Apple careful to be sensitive to everything, including legal liability. Catherine’s version of what happened between her and Jonathan, and the maxifilm’s ‘revelation’ about the pernicious believability of anything we’re given to look at it, comes with the smug inflection of someone still punning on history with herstory. Because for all its hot-topicality, the revelations depend on a seven-hour-long withholding of key info (itself excused with a waft of the hand at traumatised reticence) to explain what’s till then been behaviour from Catherine bafflingly not in her interest while only in the interest of the plot.
Set aside this style of plotting and what it does to sustaining drama and tension over such a long run-time - like someone making you needle out of them why they’re upset - Disclaimer’s climax has that affected overconfidence in its own wisdom that renders its big statement sententious. It’s meant to Make You Think; it makes you wince. It reminded me of that sad but hard-to-shake line of Updike on Carl Sagan, that there’s always been something vulgar about his books. Or that joke about Mark Z Danielewski’s David-Foster-Wallace-esque House of Leaves, to call it Infinite Junior. No amount of sex and death and trauma can stave off the impression Disclaimer is Tár for kids.
In the end Cuarón’s maxifilm didn’t ring—I won’t say true, because what’s true in art? Ring with that harmony and thronging resonance of great art that makes something inside you vibrate in kind. But we needn’t add to our worries by locating the discordance between Cuarón’s native land and where he set his story, let alone between his lofty aims and the flop of their execution—how Francis Ford Coppola defined (and he ought to know) the pretentious.
I’d define it a touch otherwise. What do directors direct? They direct our attention. The same applies to all artists: the whole of an artwork - its parts and their relations, its stresses and intervals - are the sum of what they want us to notice. But everything they get us to notice - the length of a shot, an elicited performance, the choice of music - has to have a good reason in itself and in concert with everything else.6 Otherwise we’ll notice that we don’t really know what we noticed them for; if sentimentality is unearned emotion then pretentiousness is unearned emphasis. Disclaimer: I love Cuarón for his ‘oners’ and their choreography, for the way he generates meaning between foreground and background like Kuleshov taught us of the shots either side of a cut. But we should go by works, not artists. And seven-hours is a lot of work in which to earn every emphasis—even or especially for Alfonso Cuarón.
Come back Michael Caine dancing to Aphex Twin! We’ll pull your finger, Jasper!
The first time I saw the film was at a getting-to-know-you cinema trip at uni. One new course-mate left the cinema chiding, “I prefer films that make me feel good about myself.” (She I don’t think it’s totally irrelevant to relate was American.)
A mantra: special effects don’t have to be photorealistic; they just have to be effective.
And dependably well. She’s always so great in whatever she’s in it’s like she’s a visiting alien from Planet Actor.
You resisted the idea of writing this essay in the second-person. You feared testing everyone’s patience.
About a good enough reason is virtuosity or exuberance. Not everything in art has to be press-ganged into structural service.