It’s sunset in Forte dei Marmi, and Catherine’s just returned to her hotel suite with a crisp white wine — a valedictory drink for a perfect day. Nicky’s asleep because exhaustion is a hallmark of the contented child — making core memories is hard work. Balcony doors are flung open to the salty Mediterranean breeze. It’s the last day in the last place Catherine Ravenscroft will ever live without secrets.
A few episodes ago, Catherine told her mother, an ailing woman pathologically unable to grasp what her daughter was confiding, what happened that night in Italy. Catherine’s husband has also been unable to hear her, deaf to anything but the gonging of his own jealous rage. It’s an insult that Stephen Brigstocke is the first person to really listen to Catherine’s awful story. He is the father of the villain of her life. A perfect stranger.
Perhaps it’s for Stephen’s sake that she chooses to Tarantino her story. Or maybe it’s because even now, sitting at Stephen’s kitchen table, Catherine can’t bring herself to say the words outright. She begins with Jonathan’s death before circling back to her sundowner and the hotel key she mistakenly left in the door. Nancy was right about the drowning, Catherine admits right away. Catherine fell asleep, and when she woke up, Catherine was paralyzed by her fear of the sea. “I didn’t risk my life for my child and that is something I have to live with.†Ten points to Nancy.
But Jonathan did risk his. He took off after Nicholas while Catherine watched from the waist-high water screaming no, just like Nicholas screamed “no†the last time we saw this rescue scene. No one but Catherine noticed Jonathan struggling in the water at first — Nancy was right about that, too. “I didn’t do a single thing to help him,†Catherine adds tauntingly. This is the scene you hire Cate Blanchett to play. For six episodes, Catherine Ravenscroft has been frenzied and vulnerable, but in Disclaimer’s final showdown, she’s steely and exacting. Who but Cate Blanchett could nail this man to this chair, listening to a story he doesn’t want to hear? (For that matter, who else could sell the line “I was joyous†to describe an ordinary beach day?)
By the time Catherine explains to Stephen why she let his boy drown, it feels almost merciful. But she doesn’t approach it as a practiced documentary-maker might — as a series of facts presented sequentially. Catherine tells the story of her rape as a trauma survivor does, doing her best to conjure the dark collage of sensory details imprinted on her memory. Putrid smells and bad tastes in her mouth. It’s been twenty years, and she still can’t utter it all. For example, Catherine doesn’t mention that Jonathan pierced his arm with his pocketknife — a gift from Mr. Brigstocke — and forced her to drink the blood. She doesn’t describe how he stood at her ear, the blade positioned at her eye, and screamed. She doesn’t say, “Next, your son hit me,†but the more obfuscatory formulation: “I’d never been hit before.â€
When Jonathan finally pulled out his camera — a gift from Mrs. Brigstocke — Catherine remembers feeling relief. Maybe all he wanted was the photos. Maybe if she did what he asked, he’d leave her son alone. So she put on the red clothes and posed as best she could. She did what he told her. Bite your lip, open your legs. She gasped and groaned as directed; Jonathan did the same, ejaculating into his cargo shorts without ever touching Catherine.
These flashbacks are presented without audio, as though the sound of Jonathan’s voice and Catherine’s own crying are too excruciating to fully recall. Stephen says nothing as he absorbs the true story of what happened that night, allowing this brutalized woman to drink the sleeping-pill laced tea that he brewed for her. “Please go now,†Catherine asked Jonathan after he dropped his camera. A mistake, she thinks. Twenty years later and she’s still wondering if there’s something she could have done to change it. He did not go. Stephen’s son raped Catherine over and over again for three and a half hours. When he was finally through, he told her how “nice†it had been.
Catherine considered phoning the police. She took photos of her injuries and collected Jonathan’s semen. But when Jonathan drowned the next day, Catherine saw another way forward. She could pretend it never happened. She could delete the pictures. She even secretly aborted a much longed for pregnancy, fearing the baby might belong to her rapist. So, no, she doesn’t have any proof for Stephen, but really what proof does he have for his wife’s scribblings? It’s only as she finishes her story that Stephen’s sleepy time concoction overpowers her. Catherine falls to the floor; Stephen hovers with a paring knife. He tells her he’s heading to the hospital to end this once and for all. What must it feel like to be at another Brigstocke man’s feet in this way? Here Catherine is again, unable to stay awake and protect her son.
Stephen and Catherine’s slow race across London to reach Nicholas’s ICU bed is paced like a thriller only there are zero thrills. Stephen is in a taxi; his obstacles are a chatty driver and roadworks. Catherine gulps down a liter of (iced) instant coffee; her hurdles are the waiting time it takes Bolt to find a driver and speed cameras. Stephen arrives first, breezes by the hospital reception desk because he’s a bit of a VIP now, and finds that Nicholas has already been extubated. He breathes with the help of a cannula, but this is the closest to alive we’ve seen him since he phoned his mother in sobs.
Despite the night Stephen’s just had, this pathetic man really does seem like he’s about to inject Catherine’s son with Liquid-Plumr. Luckily, just in time, Nick whispers the one word in the (British) English language that instantly turns back the clock. “Mum?†There’s something about the sound of it that arrests Stephen. A man begging for his mother becomes a boy again. Nick reaches out for Catherine’s hand and finds a perfect stranger instead. Suddenly, Stephen is a father again, tearfully clutching a crying boy, the one his son died to save. Did Jonathan whisper for his own mum as the sea battered him? If Stephen kills Nick, what did his son die for? Saving Nick was Jonathan’s one selfless act, as Stephen told us episodes ago, when he appeared almost baffled by his son’s behavior. Does it make more sense to him now? Is it easier to imagine Jonathan as an atoning predator than as a hero?
As he leaves the hospital defeated, Stephen runs into Dreadful Robert — Robert who has been ignoring his wife’s warning phone calls and texts all morning — and tells him how sorry he is for getting it all so wrong. There was no affair; there was a rape. There was no murder; there was something closer to justice. Dreadful Robert demands to know how Stephen could have gotten it all so wrong, but of course it’s easy to see why Stephen would embrace the lie at the heart of The Perfect Stranger. His son was brave. His wife was talented. Why would anyone question it?
By the time Catherine finally gets done legging it to the hospital, Nytol coursing through her veins, Robert is ready with an apology. But all she cares about is Nicky. “It’s okay,†her son tells her as she cries. He’s tender with her. Later, Robert will reconvene with his wife at their boy’s bedside, the sun flooding gorgeously through the window over Nick’s shoulder. If episode three gave us Alfonso Cuarón’s Pietà , this is his nativity. Everyone is born into some new form.
“Why didn’t you question it?†Robert asks Stephen by way of accusation. “Why didn’t you?†Stephen asks Robert in turn. Why didn’t you trust your wife? Why was it easier to imagine Catherine as an adultress than to let her speak? Robert apologizes to Catherine for this, but he also offloads some of the responsibility onto her: Why didn’t you tell me? None of it matters to Catherine anyway. She’s not finished with Dreadful Robert because he believed the worst of her; she’s finished because he found the truth of her trauma more palatable than the possibility she had an affair. “It’s almost like you’re relieved I was raped,†she observes, to which Robert makes no answer at all.
Instead, the reconciliation at the end of Disclaimer is between mother and son, who hold each other and exchange I love yous. What must it feel like to hug your son for the first time in forever? Though Nicholas was in the next room the night of her attack, he doesn’t remember a thing about it. But can we know things we don’t remember? After making his feeble apology, Stephen heads home to burn the remaining copies of The Perfect Stranger, along with his wedding ring and his dead wife’s cardigan. He’s burning the photos that served as Nancy’s inspiration for the novel when he notices a figure looming at the edge the frame. It’s Nicky, frozen in fear and watching. Paralyzed. There’s a whole causal chain implied by the image, which Cuarón allows to linger. When Jonathan swam out to the dinghy, Nicky screamed no.
Before I watched Disclaimer, I read an interview in which Cuarón claimed not to know how to make a TV series. I assumed he was being self-deprecating or even a little controversial — daring us to watch and managing expectations all at the same time. Seven episodes later, though, I agree with him. Disclaimer is not a very good TV series. It’s plotted like an extra, extra long film. Instead of offering viewers a glimpse of the big reveal in each episode, we get walloped with a U-turn over the course of two or three episodes. Instead of giving us legible signs that Catherine was not the monster of The Perfect Stranger, Cuarón gave us slight evidence that can only be meaningfully interpreted in hindsight. Her hysterical response to reading Nancy’s novel — how it caused her to moan and vomit — isn’t a typical “guilt†response, in retrospect. There are others, too: the way Catherine shut down when Robert questioned her; how she lashed out when a colleague grabbed her. These could be manifestations of her defensiveness or the instincts of a trauma survivor.
TV also tends to be a bit tidier than film, especially at the end. Nancy’s novel kickstarted the events of Disclaimer but her name is barely uttered in the series finale. Remember her version of Jonathan? How young and timid he was. What did Nancy understand about her son? Yes, she wrote The Perfect Stranger — a book that transformed the violent monster from Catherine’s nightmare into a weak-kneed ingénue. But Nancy didn’t show that book to anyone, not even her own husband.
Was she writing the Jonathan she believed in, or was she a grieving mother writing the Jonathan that she wished for? When she saw his leery photos of Catherine and mixed them in her mind with whatever Sasha’s mother told her, did Nancy at last see her son clearly? “Beware of narrative and form,†Cuarón warned us in the series premiere. But deceptive narrative and form are not what wreaked havoc on Catherine’s life. The Perfect Stranger was a novel locked in a drawer.
In truth, the revenge scheme that nearly ended the life of Nicholas Ravenscroft started with Stephen. A trained English teacher who over-identified with made-up characters. Who was unable to distinguish possibility from reality. Who reduced the world into fallen heroes and secret villains. Really, we should beware of bad readers.