Mike Leigh’s Naked is a bitterly funny, upsetting drama, held together by David Thewlis’s Johnny. Its treatment of women remains troubling, but the performance makes sustained attention to this cruel man worth the discomfort.
Mike Leigh’s Naked is worth enduring, which is a recommendation we would not give lightly. It follows Johnny, a cynical Mancunian drifter, through a London where the people he encounters have little protection from either cruelty or loneliness. Leigh gives his intelligence and misogyny room to become exhausting, and David Thewlis makes the company difficult to leave. The film asks a good deal of our patience; for much of its 131 minutes, the writing and acting justify it.
Thewlis is the reason the talk holds. He makes Johnny’s speed of thought exciting, then lets us hear how often that intelligence is being used to belittle somebody else. We laughed at his verbal cruelty, then felt ashamed of ourselves when the joke depended on another person’s humiliation. That reaction comes from how Thewlis makes the humour and the bullying happen together, without giving us a comfortable pause in which to separate them. Being quick with an answer becomes a way of keeping other people from answering back.
Lesley Sharp’s Louise and Katrin Cartlidge’s Sophie give us reasons to care about the people subjected to Johnny’s contempt. Sharp supplies a steadiness that makes a welcome change from his aggression, while Cartlidge makes vulnerability difficult to dismiss. Leigh’s dialogue can sound merciless, but the cast keep bringing us back to the effort involved in getting through an encounter with this man. We need their reactions, especially when his cleverness threatens to become the only thing the film is interested in.
Dick Pope’s cinematography makes the twilight London feel inhospitable without turning it into a picturesque reward for enduring Johnny. The city remains a place in which people have to live, and that matters in a film so easily swept along by one man’s disgust. Alison Chitty’s production design keeps the surroundings sufficiently ordinary for his pronouncements to sound intrusive. Her work helps the encounters feel like interruptions of lives already under strain, giving us something to consider beyond the man doing most of the talking.
Jon Gregory’s editing is patient with the dialogue, sometimes beyond what the dialogue deserves. Several exchanges ramble after Johnny has made his point, and his persistence starts to exhaust ours. Yet cutting the conversations down to their sharpest lines would make him easier to enjoy and easier to forgive, so some of that excess earns its place. Andrew Dickson’s music helps sustain the unease without turning every change from comedy to cruelty into an announcement.
The more serious difficulty is the treatment of women. Leigh shows sexual violation and misogyny with a frankness that is hard to stomach, but the women are not always given enough room to make their suffering count as more than evidence of male awfulness. Sharp and Cartlidge resist that narrowing through the force of their performances. The writing does not consistently help them. We can recognise the film’s disgust at cruelty and still find that Johnny gets too much of the pleasure of speaking while others do too much of the suffering.
As a black comedy, Naked gets considerable force from making laughter uncomfortable almost as soon as it begins. Its abrasive humour is more revealing than the repeated expressions of despair, because it makes us notice how readily we enjoy listening to someone behave badly. Thewlis gives us ample reason to stay, even when Leigh seems reluctant to grant anybody else quite as much attention. Choose it when there is time afterwards to argue about more than the leading man.
