Video
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0
... (more) Note: All 2.0/1.0 are 192 kbps...
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit) French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps) Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps) Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0 French (Canada): Dolby Digital 2.0 German: Dolby Digital 2.0 Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0 Latin: Dolby Digital 2.0 Portugese: Dolby Digital Mono(less) Note: All 2.0/1.0 are 192 kbps
Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German SDH, Czech, Danish, Finnish... (more)
English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German SDH, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish (less)
Disclosure Blu-ray offers solid video and great audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
An executive at a high-tech firm is passed over for a promotion, only to discover that his new boss is a woman with whom he'd had an affair 10 years earlier. When the woman immediately makes an aggressive sexual overture toward him, the man sues for sexual harassment, which uncovers a series of revelations about his own past and the future of his company.
Disclosure is best known as the film in which Demi Moore sexually harassed Michael Douglas,
and much of the male audience said, "Sounds good to me!" The late Michael Crichton, who
wrote the novel and co-produced the movie, had an almost infallible instinct for hot-button
issues. When he published his novel in early 1994, it was just a few years after the Clarence
Thomas confirmation testimony of Anita Hill created national debate over he said/she said
charges. Those hearings led to amendments in the law that have made sexual harassment cases a
common fixture in courts and arbitrations. Crichton styled the novel of Disclosure as a
Rorschach test based on role reversal. How would the reader react to the piggish behavior
typically associated with a male boss when practiced by a woman against a male subordinate?
But in the hands of Barry Levinson and his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Paul Attanasio,
the story eventually morphed into something else.
At this point, I should warn the reader that the following discussion assumes familiarity with the
story. If you proceed further, you will encounter spoilers. To avoid them, skip down to the
sections on video and audio.
Last warning: spoilers below!
Tom Sanders (Douglas) is a senior member of the production division of DigiCom, a Seattle-based high-tech
company that Crichton seems to have assembled from disparate parts of various companies
that dominated hi-tech in the early Nineties. (You can spot elements of Microsoft, Apple,
Sun Microsystems and probably others.) On this particular Monday, Tom says goodbye to his
part-time lawyer wife, Susan (Caroline Goodall), and their two kids, and heads to the office
expecting to be promoted to vice president. Instead, he finds he's been passed over in favor of an
outsider, Meredith Johnson (Moore), a hot shot from finance, who's the chief architect of an
acquisition by a company called Conley-White Communications that will make the shareholders
of DigiCom rich beyond their wildest dreams. DigiCom's oily president, Bob Garvin (Donald
Sutherland), practically worships at Meredith's feet. Inconveniently enough, she also happens to
be an old girlfriend of Tom's from his days as a wild-and-crazy guy.
Tom breaks the bad news to his team (Nicholas Sadler, Susie Plakson and Dennis Miller, playing
himself—badly). Then they all get back to work trying to figure out why the company's
upcoming flagship product, Arcamax, a portable CD-ROM drive (hey, it was 1994), is rolling off
the Malaysian assembly line with one defective unit after another. The Conley-White acquisition
is about to be announced, and Arcamax is key to the deal.
That evening, though, Meredith summons Tom to a meeting in her office and tries to seduce him.
When he breaks off the encounter, she becomes enraged. The next morning, Garvin's corporate
hitman, Blackburn (Dylan Baker), tells Tom that Meredith has accused him of attacking her.
Blackburn suggests Tom settle quietly by volunteering to transfer to a backwater division in
Austin. (As Garvin later admits, it's like asking a duck to volunteer for a transfer to à
l'orange.)
When Tom refuses, a deep chill settles over his work life and the dirty tricks begin. Everyone
backs away from Tom, including his old friend Stephanie Kaplan (Rosemary Forsyth), the
company's CFO, whom Meredith calls "the stealth bomber".
Tom hires an aggressive plaintiff's lawyer, Catherine Alvarez (Roma Maffia), who's known as a
publicity hound. Faced with the one thing they can't risk—adverse PR that would jeopardize the
Conley-White deal—Garvin and DigiCom agree to private mediation, which allows Levinson
and Attanasio to present a neatly condensed dramatization of the distortions that an adversary
proceeding wreaks on the truth. Facts are used to buttress lies; pasts are dug up to be
reinterpreted for ulterior motives; working relationships are destroyed, along with marriages and
friendships; innocent conversations are given sinister constructions. Disclosure's proceedings
may be miraculously resolved by the eleventh-hour discovery of an unlikely recording of the
encounter between Tom and Meredith, but in real life, there are no such neat outcomes. One is
usually left with a choice between radically conflicting stories.
Throughout the proceedings, Tom keeps receiving mysterious emails from "A Friend" warning
him that something else is going on, and here is where Levinson and Attanasio subtly shift
Crichton's story into something more than a tract on sexual harrassment. It turns out that
Meredith never really wanted Tom for his body. She just wanted an excuse to fire him so that
she'd have someone to blame when, after the acquisition, Arcamax turned out to be a disaster.
Hints are dropped throughout the film, but it's only near the end that Tom learns how Meredith
made DigiCom an attractive candidate for acquisition. She'd slashed costs to dress up the
balance sheet, and one of the key areas was the Malaysian plant where Arcamax is manufactured.
As a result of the cuts, the product no longer performed to spec, but who cares as long as the deal
goes through? Just blame the problems on someone who's no longer there.
Meredith's shenanigans (the financial ones, not the sexual ones) are a bull's-eye parody of the
tactics employed by Eighties corporate raiders and leveraged buyout specialists, and it's
appropriately ironic that the actor best known for playing Gordon Gekko should here portray the
victim of a woman who could have been one of Gekko's lieutenants. "I'm only playing the game
the way you guys set it up", Meredith tells Tom, after all has been revealed—and she isn't just
talking about sex.
The image on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Disclosure is something of a mixed
bag. The colors, black levels and contrast range appear to accurately reproduce Tony Pierce-Robert's
(Underworld) cinematography, which gives Seattle a picturesque haze and finds all the
intriguing angles in the elaborate set built to represent DigiCom's Seattle office. Fleshtones often
appear somewhat pinkish, but my recollection is that Disclosure has always looked that way.
The film's grain appears to be natural and undisturbed by inappropriate digital manipulation such as
high frequency filtering or artificial sharpening. The use of a BD-50, along with an absence of
extras, has allowed the image to "breathe", ensuring a lack of compression artifacts.
The disappointment is an intermittent lack of sharpness, especially in distant objects and faces in
longer shots. While it is always possible that such softness is inherent in the source material, that
was not a typical characteristic of films of the period, and I don't remember being struck by it
when the film was in theaters. Nor is filtering or softening of the image noticeable in close-ups,
where the image is just as likely to be sharp and detailed. Since Disclosure was shot with
anamorphic lenses and utilized the entire expanse of the 35mm frame, there should be no loss of
detail due to blow-ups or extractions. I can't explain the indistinctness; I can only report it.
The highlight of Disclosure's DTS-HD MA 5.1 tracks is Tom Sanders' journey into the virtual
reality environment known as "The Corridor", which is the only way he can inspect the
company's files after his privileges are revoked. An ILM creation, The Corridor may not look
like much by today's gaming standard, but it sounds fantastic, as the film's mixers take
advantage of its artificial world to surround the viewer with voices, echoes, footfalls and a kind
of nightmare parody of the paranoid office environment in which Tom has been operating since
his encounter with Meredith. One of the most interesting editorial choices in the film is to
maintain this sonic environment even as the scene shifts to the evil Meredith back at DigiCom, as
she sits down to her computer to begin erasing evidence of her misdeeds. At this point, there's no
real difference between the real Meredith and the spooky avatar Tom will shortly encounter in
VR. They're both cold-blooded, and they're both his enemy.
Nothing else on the track offers the same opportunity for dramatically enveloping sound, though
the mixers do take advantage of what was still, in 1994, the relatively new format of discrete 5.1
surround. In the opening sequence, seagulls and ferry horns are heard in the rear channels, and
the scenes at DigiCom's office have a nice environmental ambiance. Ennio Morricone's urgently
understated score, which, as always with Morricone, suits the action perfectly, weaves in and out
of the action with beautiful tonality. I'd forgotten just how good it is. Dialogue is clear and, in the
best scenes, intense.
Near the end of Disclosure, after Tom has vanquished Meredith, he goes to her soon-to-be-vacated office to pick up some files. He finds her
there packing, where she brags about the
headhunters calling her with offers. "Don't be surprised", she says, "if I'm back in ten years to
buy this place". With the passage of time, we know exactly where someone of Meredith's talents
and temperament will be in ten years. The tech boom and the dot.com bust would have made any
interest in DigiCom irrelevant (assuming the company still existed). By 2004, a finance whiz like
Meredith would have moved where the real action was: on Wall Street, bundling mortgage and
consumer debt into bonds (otherwise known as "derivatives") and selling them to willing buyers
with deceptively high ratings from compliant ratings agencies. Within a few years, she'd have
mastered the lingo of credit default swaps, and if she were nimble enough, she'd either get out
just in time in 2007, or position herself to be indispensable when the bailout came in 2008. "I
thought we were buying this company because they could build things", says the head of
Conley-White. How quaint that seems now. Highly recommended as a film, but see above regarding the
Blu-ray image.
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