THE FRUSTRATION OF INTENT: DISCLAIMER (2024, Apple TV, dir by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, 7 eps, approx 350 minutes)

DISCLAIMER is a worthy, interesting, pointed work. It is full of committed performances, incredible technique and craft, and important themes. And yet, in some ways, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Alfonso Cuaron is one of the most talented and daring of the current crop of world cinema masters. Each new movie is a cause for celebration. Each new work is an experiment in genre, form, narrative. Yet each movie coheres to a continuum of Cuaron concerns.

Very few moviemakers excel beyond one or two genres. Cuaron has now proven himself adept at everything from period literary adaptation (THE LITTLE PRINCESS) to big budget pop entries (HARRY POTTER & THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN) to Mexican new wave psycho sexual road trip movies (Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) to spiritual dystopian sci-fi (CHILDREN OF MEN) to...

It’s great to see cinematographer extraordinnaire Emmanuel Lubezki (and Bruno Delbonnel) return to collaboration with Cuaron.

You get the idea.

And DISCLAIMER is Cuaron's long form cinema on television work. He's stated in interviews he was inspired by the likes of Ingmar Bergman's FANNY & ALEXANDER, Lars Von Trier's THE KINGDOM, David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN.

DISCLAIMER shares many of these canonical classics traits: a cinematic approach adapted to television, a belief that the long form limited series can explore complex themes maybe even better than a 2-3 hour feature, incredibly intense performances from Cate Blanchett, Kline, Cohen, etc.

The frustration, at least this writer feels, is that its final revelation, its reason for being, DISCLAIMER while meaningful, may actually be a bit on the nose and one dimensional. And in order to explain this, unfortunately, there will be big spoilers (though couched in generalities not specifics). So if you don't want to know broadly the "twist"/"reveal" of the series yet, stop here.

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The limited series tells the story across several different narrations and styles and time periods of how a successful documentarian, Catherine (Cate Blanchett) with a well off if feckless husband Robert (Sasha Baron Cohen) has her world turned upside down when she receives a self-published book "A Perfect Stranger" that tells the story of an affair she had years before on an Italian vacation.

The ocean (or sea) has now played a key thematic motif role in at least four Cuaron works (Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, CHILDREN OF MEN, ROMA, and DISCLAIMER)

During this trip, her son, Nick, was rescued from the Italian ocean by Jonathan, the young man Catherine slept with. Jonathan, unfortunately, drowned during the attempt. Catherine hid the affair and denied to the police that she had any relationship with Jonathan.

Stephen, Jonathan's father, (Kevin Kline) not only loses his son but later his bereaved wife Nancy (an always great Lesley Manville). But first, Nancy discovers erotic photos of Catherine in Jonathan's bedroom implying an affair. Catherine never came forward to reveal that she and Jonathan had had any relationship.

And Stephen, now alone, and without a family, hatches a plan of revenge on Catherine for her selfishness and callousness.

In a strange way, DISCLAIMER is both too long and then abruptly, too sudden. For six episodes, the audience is playing a kind of game. Stephen's revenge works out beyond any reasonable expectation. Catherine is utterly outed and humiliated. But you sense, from Cuaron's filmmaking craft, that we're not being told the entire story.

The central evening in question in which Catherine and Jonathan may have had a torrid one night stand affair is the “Rashomon” locus of the entire series.

The problem is that you expect the reveal to be something almost David Lynchian in the reconfiguration of narrative, truth, facts. But instead the reveal essentially is that everyone made assumptions about what happened during that Italian trip but the only one to truly know is Catherine (since Jonathan is dead and Nick is either too traumatized or too young to remember). And Catherine isn't allowed to tell her side of the story until episode seven.

It's a totally worthy reveal. We all jump to conclusions. We all abandon critical thinking (if we ever had any tools of critical thinking to begin with) too often in favor of believing outright what we're told.

And all of Catherine's seemingly "guilty" behaviors are thrown into a new light of paralysis and trauma when we finally hear "the truth".

But the problem is that the story essentially trades one villain for another. The seeming narcissistic selfish behaviors of one character are transferred to the violent, abusive behaviors of another. And in each instance, there's a bit of one or two dimensionality to the characters.

For six episodes, DISCLAIMER feels like it's promising, building to a three or four dimensional reveal that it never quite has.

The two central families are “rhymes” in DISCLAIMER. A strong Mother, a feckless Father, an adrift son.

This writer thought all the doubling would come into play. The two families are mirrors (wife husband, only child-a son). They both have cats (boy does Cuaron focus on those damn cats). Catherine's documentary storytelling is doubled by Stephen's own self-publishing of his wife's work about their son. Both husbands-Cohen and Kline-turn out to be a bit spineless in their way. This writer thought the reveal would be a reconfiguration or conflation of the two families. An interrogation of how storytelling and narrative are a kind of self-justification. That they might even be THE same family dealing with their grief through fictionalized narrative.

And in a way, DISCLAIMER is exactly that. But it feels like there could have been a deep profundity and mystery mined more. Instead, ultimately, it is a worthy movie about how we jump to conclusions without being in possession of the full facts.

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This is a frustration because for six episodes, DISCLAIMER is tantalizingly building up to something. Cuaron commits to an incredible sound design and visual language (with the help of ace cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel) that often veers into poetry.

A rumbling refrigerator, the difference between a classical camera style and a messy style, iris transitions in and out of flashbacks, different kinds of voice over narration. All these touches are creating a cinematic puzzle we're eager to put fully together.

In retrospect, some of Cuaron's movies can feel like amazing experiments that sacrifice depth for the thrill of surmounting the unique technical challenge the story posed. GRAVITY might be a good example of this. DISCLAIMER is another.

Cuaron at his best gets to the very heart of human nature. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN and CHILDREN OF MEN are both cinematic masterworks AND humanist masterpieces.

DISCLAIMER is going for the same kind of familial gestalt. All three works course with themes of lost or absent children, sexuality, redemption. And even though its final episode is wobbly and almost mustache twirling in the reveals, DISCLAIMER's finale also has a moment of tremendous transcendence when Stephen, as played by Kevin Kline, experiences a true change of heart and sense of mercy and realization (after six episodes as a kind of Dickensian' villain).

We're lucky anytime Cuaron makes a new work. And we're lucky here. DISCLAIMER is worthy of rewatch and showcases a master moviemaker still in full control of his talents and toolbox.

And yet, when you've seen Cuaron at his best, you wish he might push himself even further to get at more complex truths in an unexpected way.

But it's unfair to always expect and demand unyielding brilliance. We should be grateful when a great director makes a work like DISCLAIMER. It may not be a masterpiece but it has flashes and moments of brilliance. And that's still better than 99.9% of what most of us can get to.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.