When Cuarón went off-key

Say it ain’t so, Alfonso

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

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…