*** NAKED
Mike Leigh’s virtuosity as a writer-director and the raw theatrical power of David Thewlis, his lead actor, combine with the sheer unpleasantness of much of Naked to make it a disturbingly ambiguous experience. The apocalyptic, end-of-the-millennium rage of Thewlis’s Johnny–an articulate, grungy working-class lout on the dole who abuses women and spews negativity–registers at times as Leigh’s commentary on the bleak harvest of Thatcherism. But at other times it registers as the ravings of a malcontent too frustrated and paralyzed to even know what he wants. Sorting out the intelligence from the hysteria is no easy matter, and the picture rubs our noses in this uncertainty so remorselessly that we sometimes forget that what we’re watching is largely a comedy.
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Much as Johnny’s rants, oscillating between commentary and pseudocommentary, profundity and pretension, confound our responses to him, the compulsive laughter of the cartoonish Jeremy–a laughter as mirthless as the titters of Beavis and Butt-head–tends to make our own amusement stick in our throat. If we periodically forget that we’re watching a comedy, Leigh’s Brechtian strategy ensures that even when we remember we still aren’t likely to be amused.
The locus classicus of this manner of preparing and staging existential confrontations between different styles of acting (and “being”) is Jacques Rivette’s work in the early 70s, Out 1 and Celine and Julie Go Boating, though in these French movies fantasy and paranoia create a very different sort of discomfort and uncanniness. In Leigh’s movies, once the diverse actorly strands have been woven into fairly containable units, like the families at the center of High Hopes and Life Is Sweet, we wind up responding to what passes for a unified story; the stylistic anomalies–the upper-class caricatures in High Hopes, for example, or the loony character who opens a restaurant in Life Is Sweet–seem relatively marginal. In Naked, which is about individuals rather than a family unit, the continuity is more attenuated, and some form of narrative chaos always seems to be waiting in the wings. The results are also somewhat more uneven, despite the focus and power provided by Leigh and his actors; Jeremy in particular registers as a satirical monster left over from some earlier Leigh picture, forced into the story to make Johnny seem a little less repugnant.
At one point Brian asks Johnny whether he has anywhere to go, and Johnny replies, “I’ve got an infinite number of places to go. The problem is where to stay.” That line might almost stand for Leigh’s own kaleidoscopic stylistic procedures. In addition to the contrasts in acting styles, the movie’s production design (by Alison Chitty) changes in style as Johnny lurches from one encounter to the next. Louise and Sophie’s two-story flat, technically a maisonette, is strictly naturalistic, while the streets and alleys at night are distinctly more metaphysical. The man in the truck puts up two series of absurdist posters whose relation to each other encapsulates the movie’s bleakness: the first, featuring an enormous mouth with clenched teeth, is headlined “Therapy?” and the second is a banner with the word “Cancelled,” placed over the first. In the bombed-out England we see here, even querulous speculations about possible improvements get canceled before they can be properly entertained: at one point Johnny even berates Louise for having a job.
