{"id":2359314,"date":"2024-10-25T00:28:01","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T04:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/disclaimer-bad-material-adapted-poorly-washington-examiner\/"},"modified":"2024-10-25T00:30:36","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T04:30:36","slug":"disclaimer-bad-material-adapted-poorly-washington-examiner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/disclaimer-bad-material-adapted-poorly-washington-examiner\/","title":{"rendered":"Disclaimer: Bad material, adapted poorly &#8211; Washington Examiner"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fdisclaimer-bad-material-adapted-poorly-washington-examiner%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2359314&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The review discusses Apple TV+&#8217;s new limited\u2063 series *Disclaimer*, created \u200dby Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, known for acclaimed films like *Children of Men* and *Gravity*. Starring Cate\u200c Blanchett and Kevin \u200cKline, the show was expected to be a standout \u200bthriller \u2062but is criticized as being poorly written and acted, with excessive stylization that detracts from the narrative.\u2064 <\/p>\n<p>The plot centers on Catherine \u200bRavenscroft (Blanchett), a documentarian whose life is disrupted when she\u2064 receives a self-published novel \u200cthat reveals her past affair that\u2064 ended tragically. The story unfolds with Catherine facing her tormentor, Stephen (Kline), the father of \u2063her \u2064lover \u2063who died while saving her \u200bson. While the Italian \u200bscenes are noted for their engaging cinematography, the narrative\u200c raises questions \u200cabout its reliability, \u200bdespite warning\u200d viewers about potential themes of sexual violence.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, the review laments Cuar\u00f3n&#8217;s failure\u200b to deliver a captivating adaptation, suggesting \u200bthat his creative choices lead\u2063 to\u2064 an overly ambitious and\u2062 chaotic melodrama rather than\u2062 the\u2062 gripping drama it \u2062could have been. The\u200b performances lack depth, and even Blanchett&#8217;s talent \u2062is overshadowed \u200bby the material, leading to \u200ba disappointing viewing experience.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><\/p>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-button\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-icon td-icon-mobile\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-header-search-button-mob dropdown-toggle\" data-toggle=\"dropdown\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-search-icon td-icon-search\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-button\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-icon td-icon-mobile\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<div class=\"tdb-drop-down-search\" aria-labelledby=\"td-header-search-button\">\n<div class=\"tdb-drop-down-search-inner\">\n<form method=\"get\" class=\"tdb-search-form\" action=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/\"><\/form>\n<div class=\"tdb-aj-search\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/#\" role=\"button\" aria-label=\"Search\" class=\"tdb-head-search-btn dropdown-toggle\" data-toggle=\"dropdown\"><i class=\"tdb-search-icon td-icon-search\"><\/i><\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<div class=\"tdb-sacff-txt\">Magazine &#8211; Life &amp; Arts <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<h1 class=\"tdb-title-text\"><i>Disclaimer<\/i>: Bad material, adapted poorly<\/h1>\n<div><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-title-line\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<p>To watch <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/apple\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple TV+&rsquo;s<\/a> new limited series <em>Disclaimer<\/em> is to observe the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/streaming-video\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">streaming era<\/a> at its most ambitious and maddening. The show&rsquo;s creator, Alfonso Cuar&oacute;n, is the famed cinematic visionary behind such masterworks as <em>Children of Men<\/em> (2006) and <em>Gravity<\/em> (2013). Its leading performers, Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, are the long-beloved winners of basically every acting award on the planet. By all rights, the new production ought to be one of the high points of the television year, a stylish thriller that spares no expense and shimmers with star power. Yet the series is just plain awful: poorly written, badly acted, and so bizarrely stylized that one fears for Cuar&oacute;n&rsquo;s long-term prospects. If <em>Disclaimer<\/em> is the auteur&rsquo;s first and presumably best streaming service idea, what viewing horrors might the future hold?<\/p>\n<div class=\"article-paywall\">\n<p>The show tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), a renowned documentarian living in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/london\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">London<\/a> with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). What appears to be an idyllic existence is interrupted when, one evening, a mysterious post arrives bearing a stranger&rsquo;s self-published novel. No mere vanity project, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/books\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">the book<\/a> is instead a recounting of Catherine&rsquo;s darkest secret: 20 years ago, vacationing abroad, our heroine conducted an affair that ended in tragedy. Who is the novel&rsquo;s author, and what does he or she want? More importantly, how can Catherine salvage her family when a malevolent antagonist seems intent on exposing her?<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen in Disclaimer (Apple TV+)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The answer to the first of these questions comes right away. The novel is the work of Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville), the since-deceased mother of Catherine&rsquo;s long-ago fling, Jonathan (Louis Partridge). Catherine&rsquo;s tormentor is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/new-film-city-of-dreams-explores-reality-of-child-trafficking-in-america-washington-examiner\/\" title=\"New film \u2018City of Dreams\u2019 explores reality of child trafficking in America - Washington Examiner\">young man&#038;rsquo<\/a>;s father, Stephen (Kline), who soon graduates from mailing his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/rep-thomas-massie-announces-death-of-wife-rhonda-went-to-heaven\/\" title=\"Rep. Thomas Massie Announces Death of Wife: &#039;Rhonda Went to Heaven&#039;\">wife&#038;rsquo<\/a>;s book to distributing scandalous photographs from the decades-old intrigue. While the bulk of the show&rsquo;s action follows Catherine and Stephen as they navigate their present-day hostilities, the series returns regularly to its protagonist&rsquo;s ill-fated holiday. There, played by the 31-year-old Leila George, Catherine splashes in the Mediterranean with her new lover, then-5-year-old Nicholas in tow. As the viewer learns early on, the affair ends when Jonathan drowns while pulling Nicholas from the sea. For reasons that become clear only gradually, Catherine fails to alert a lifeguard that her paramour is in trouble, thus setting in motion the chain of events that will lead, 20 years later, to her harassment-via-book.<\/p>\n<p><em>Disclaimer&rsquo;s<\/em> Italian scenes, by far the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/a-pox-on-netflixs-plague-comedy-washington-examiner\/\" title=\"A pox on Netflix\u2019s plague \u2018comedy\u2019 - Washington Examiner\">production&#038;rsquo<\/a>;s best, are sumptuously, and erotically, filmed, as well as engaging. But can we believe them? The series&rsquo;s source material is, after all, the slippery 2015 bestseller by Ren&eacute;e Knight, no paragon of narrative reliability. Like many of that decade&rsquo;s beach reads, Knight&rsquo;s novel skirts the edges of authorial trustworthiness rather than settling there for good. And what are we to make, for that matter, of the &ldquo;sexual violence&rdquo; trigger warning that precedes each episode of the show? I will not spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that something serious is amiss. Our heroine appears, at a glance, to be a narcissistic near-murderer who lies to her family in an act of shameless self-preservation. If that plot feels out of step with prevailing political orthodoxies, well, it does so for a reason.<\/p>\n<p>Apple TV+ has specialized, in recent years, in tight-lipped thrillers that make their living misdirecting the viewer. <em>Silo<\/em>, currently gearing up for its second season, is so devious that one can&rsquo;t pin down its main character for the first four or five episodes. This summer&rsquo;s <em>Presumed Innocent<\/em> remake necessarily holds its fire for a gasp-inducing finale. Watching <em>Disclaimer&rsquo;s <\/em>exceptionally well-made trailer, one expects a pulpy delight of exactly that sort. Revenge, posh accents, and sun-dappled romps &mdash; what&rsquo;s not to like? The problem is that Cuar&oacute;n began with a postmodern clunker and has produced an overwrought, heavy-as-lead telenovela. Had the filmmaker ignored Knight&rsquo;s metafictional hijinks, he might have delivered a work of breezy genius. Instead, the <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\">production sags beneath artistic &#038;ldquo<\/a>;choices&rdquo; designed, one supposes, to spruce up the book&rsquo;s subpar material.<\/p>\n<p>To begin with, Cuar&oacute;n grants his performers far too much leeway, allowing, for example, Manville to shriek like a banshee and Kline to mime tossing hand grenades as he sets about wrecking Catherine&rsquo;s life. (Seriously.) As for Blanchett, she has long been the kind of Thespian-with-a-capital-T who can&rsquo;t slice an apple without making &ldquo;acting&rdquo; faces. Given the right material, say, 2022&rsquo;s weird and wonderful <em>T&aacute;r<\/em>, the Australian&rsquo;s mannered work can enthrall. Here, permitted to chew the scenery with an overmatched Baron Cohen, the Oscar winner is as soullessly precise as a digital clock. If deranged mortification is what we want, by God, Blanchett will fake it for us.<\/p>\n<p>Yet even if its acting were flawless, <em>Disclaimer<\/em> would still suffer beneath one of the most repellent screenwriting and directorial choices in recent memory. Accompanying the series&rsquo;s action is a stilted, near-constant voice-over track that <em>describes<\/em> what audiences are plainly seeing on-screen. So stupidly literal is this narration that I had to check whether I had enabled Audio Description for the Blind by mistake. An example: Midway through the second episode, Catherine cooks and then discards a sole meuni&egrave;re while waiting for her tardy husband to come home. Never mind that we have just watched Blanchett sigh and check her phone half a dozen times. We must be told explicitly that &ldquo;Robert has not replied to your calls or texts. This troubles you.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Was <em>Disclaimer<\/em> made, as my wife jokingly suggested, for extraterrestrials new to this planet? I can&rsquo;t foreclose the possibility. The more likely answer, however, is that the show exists because of two distinct but related economic realities. In the streaming era, &ldquo;content&rdquo; is king, and few bestselling novels will escape the adapter&rsquo;s pen. Yet the remaining middlebrow books of the last decade are #MeToo provocations that feel silly and dated already. Hence, perhaps, <em>Disclaimer&rsquo;s<\/em> otherwise inexplicable risk-taking. A better-than-average television platform, Apple TV+ will surely turn out as many hits as misses in the coming years. Still, if I were in charge of Cuar&oacute;n&rsquo;s multiyear deal, I&rsquo;d be worried.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a <\/em>Washington Examiner <em>magazine contributing writer.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple TV+&#8217;s Disclaimer: Ambitious but poorly executed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":956,"featured_media":2359315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/LA.TV_.1030.webp","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[538],"tags":[43683,24822,33295,32076],"class_list":["post-2359314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-washington-examiner","tag-bad-material","tag-disclaimer","tag-media-criticism","tag-washington-examiner"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/LA.TV_.1030.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/956"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2359314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2359315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2359314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2359314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2359314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}