How strange it is the way the fundamentals of how we entertain ourselves have changed. Everything we watch on television is at the dictate of what we do with our phones and everything we might see in the cinema makes its way with the greatest speed to some streaming service. In the lead up to the last lot of Oscar nominations you could preview the nominated films from the security of your bedroom, replete with subtitles, and decide why you preferred Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein to the immensity of detail and qualification in Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of Oppenheimer, why Barbie was a better piece of filmmaking than Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
And all this is thrown into high relief by Disclaimer, the new streamer by Alfonso Cuarón which ran until November 8 and which has already been dubbed the finest thing ever made for the new television. It has Cate Blanchett at the height of her extraordinary powers and it has the same character played twenty years earlier by Leila George with sumptuous beauty, as well as an exceptionally formidable cast that includes Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, and Australia’s Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Cuarón first became famous in 2001 with the hilarious buddy film Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too) which introduced the world to Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. Cuarón made the best of the Harry Potter movies, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and its superiority was not simply because of J.K. Rowling’s elegant reversal in the plotting with the figure of Sirius Black but because of the way Cuarón concentrated the drama.
He also made Roma, the best film of 2018, and it’s hard not to be grateful to the actor friend who insisted that we see this black and white masterpiece on a big screen at the Como cinema in Prahran. The title refers not to the Eternal City with its popes and gladiators but to an upper-middle class part of Mexico City.
Disclaimer is something very different again but Alfonso Cuarón says he has not made a serial, he has made a continuous film (nevermind that it is being shown in seven episodes, for the master it’s a single movement).
This gets tricky. Colin Callender, originally of the BBC, is sometimes credited with introducing to the American television market the British idea of the serial as it’s exhibited in the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and