The exceptional asshole

“Naked” begins with a rape and gets all the more depraved from there. The main character of Mike Leigh’s film is as misanthropic and cynical as he is unkempt and surly. He’s a homeless drifter, a blathering pseudo-philosopher, a man-child whose poor relationships with women are only matched by his rough way with them. He’s the kind of man many wouldn’t want to spend a couple minutes with, let alone 2 hours, yet there’s an empathy for this character in David Thewlis’ performance that leaves us trying to decipher where life all went wrong for him.


Taking place mostly in a downcast, hopeless section of London, his scrawny, unshaven Johnny intends to crash at the flat of his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp), only to seduce her drugged-out roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge). Louise seems to be trying to move on from her old life in Manchester, and there is possibly something terribly traumatic shared between her and Johnny that is left unsaid. What is well known is that she is not pleased to have him here and that as soon as Sophie becomes clingy, the living arrangement becomes too much for him and he would rather freeze his ass off walking around London.


His night time journey of despair includes meeting a couple of different people, most notably a security guard (Peter Wight) whose job is merely the securing of empty space. His protection of “nothingness” is one of a couple reasons Johnny considers the man boring, yet the guard is hung up on the universal idea that he’s working not for a present of happiness, but a future of one. That resonates, as it seems like many people work for that same kind of thinking. That Johnny has all sorts of comebacks for that, including predictions from Nostradamus and theories about evolution, leads to thrilling conversation, as well as a hard truth. It’s one of many poignant moments in the film where its characters, many of which falling back on a kind of delusion to get through a day, seem to realize how truly ineffectual their lives have become. They have nowhere to go, no love in their lives, and no one to even care about them.


Leigh offers up the question of who has it worse: if the men are losers then the women, beholden to ideas of starting a family and having a future themselves, are instead forced to dress the wounds of these men when they get their asses kicked and then get their asses kicked themselves when the men decide to hit back. And it’s not just a matter of rich or poor either, as the film’s one lone wealthy character Sebastian (Greg Cruttwell) demonstrates quite clearly again and again. He seems like an archetype for Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho”.


There are numerous good performances here, ones that highlight the despair, anguish and depression of London’s forgotten working class people, but Thewlis is really exceptional. If Johnny is society’s pariah, then he’s a character who will go out of his way to be the man they created. He boldly provokes, nudges, irritates, and takes the piss out of people, living on scorn and contempt while eschewing any type of sympathy or pity. He is an exceptional asshole, one hard to like, but in the end, oddly easy to identify with.