Thanks to David Thewlis' performance, which has been collecting prizes since last spring's Cannes Film Festival, Johnny's energy and ferocious wit outweigh his brutishness.
It would be hard to imagine a film much sourer than Naked, but sourness is not a fault, merely a characteristic. Hollowness, now, self-indulgence, a sort of gloating emotional ugliness -- those are faults.
Mike Leigh's Naked is a great one -- a film of brutal impact, withering wit and humanity. It deserves one of the highest accolades movies can receive: Seeing it shakes you up, changes your vision.
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.
That wonderful British writer-director Mike Leigh continues down his brave, lonely road, making movies about believable people living and suffering under painfully believable circumstances.
If America's nightmare self-image is Bad Lieutenant, this is the British answer: just as driven, visionary and self-destructive but not needing an excess of drugs or blood to showcase human horrors.
