Adrift in the Wasteland (NAKED)

From the February 25, 1994 Chicago Reader. It seems that a good many colleagues have ranked this film higher in Mike Leigh’s oeuvre than I did at the time; perhaps today I’d agree with them. — J.R.

*** NAKED

(A must-see)

Directed and written by Mike Leigh

With David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Gregg Cruttwell, Claire Skinner, Peter Wight, Deborah Maclaren, and Gina McKee.

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.

The first glimpse we get of Johnny, he’s having some very rough sex with a nameless woman in a Manchester alley. Some reviewers have described this ugly encounter as a rape; but it might also be sex that’s turned progressively more violent and punitive — which is just about the only kind of sex we see in this movie, whether the sadistic male is Johnny or Jeremy (Greg Cruttwell), his upper-class doppelgänger. That most of the women are so desperate that they wind up tolerating these brutes is part of what makes Naked so disturbing, though the fact that each of these misogynists finally gets thrown out of a house by a woman allows us some respite. By the time these moments arrive, we may even feel like applauding. (If we barely remember Thewlis from his previous Leigh appearances — as the gangling, goofy youth in The Short & Curlies and as the somewhat put-upon lover of Nicola, the neurotic sister, in Life Is Sweet — this may be largely because his characters were much less mean and aggressive.)

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.

Part of this Brechtian strategy, as always with Leigh, is to mix various styles of acting, and even what might be termed various styles of conception and presentation of his characters. Leigh does a lot of preparatory work with his actors, creating veritable dossiers for their characters, much of which never figures on-screen — a form of “research” leading to workshop improvisations and eventually a script. One of Leigh’s ground rules in this process is that each actor develop her or his own character in collaboration with Leigh but in isolation from the other actors — increasing the possibility of spontaneous frictions and fusions between the various styles of representation when the actors finally come together in rehearsal and in front of a camera.

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.

To a large extent, the unevenness and the threat of narrative chaos both seem to stem from the story’s rambling, picaresque qualities. After Johnny flees from the woman in the Manchester alley, and she flees in the opposite direction, he steals a car and drives to London. From this point Leigh’s characters make up a veritable gallery of isolated individuals, most of them doomed or at least desperate. Johnny’s former Manchester girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp) is now living in a flat in London’s Islington with two other women, holding down a nondescript office job. Johnny turns up at her flat — for reasons that he never clarifies, though he says he got her address off a postcard she sent him — while she’s at work. One of her flat mates, Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), lets him in; like him she’s on welfare, and together they smoke joints while waiting for Louise to get home. (The other flat mate, who is away on holiday and turns up only shortly before the end of the picture, is Sandra — a stammering nurse played in telegraphed sitcom style by Claire Skinner, adding one more stylistic contrast to the heady brew already established.) Intercut with the gradual mutual seduction between Johnny and Sophie — consummated only after Louise arrives home and Johnny begins to berate her — are glimpses of Jeremy, a yuppie with no apparent link to any of the other characters. We see him working out in a gym, asking his masseuse out to dinner, and after dinner taking the waitress back to his flat and sexually abusing her. Jeremy’s violence and nastiness are explicitly rhymed with Johnny’s as he becomes increasingly abusive to Sophie after she tells him she’s in love with him.

Leaving the flat, Johnny has separate street encounters with Archie and Maggie, an argumentative homeless Scottish couple angrily looking for each other. (It’s no surprise that Jim Jarmusch especially likes this absurdist sequence, whose grubby setting and comic behavioral styles could have come straight out of one of his own pictures.) Next Johnny is offered shelter for the night in a strangely unfurnished but immaculate office building by a thoughtful, lonely security guard named Brian (Peter Wight, who played a hippie in Leigh’s Meantime). The philosophical conversation between the two as Brian makes his rounds is one of the film’s high points; for all the darkness of Johnny’s discourse, he’s a bit more civil here than he is in most of the rest of the movie. (”Good exists in order to be fucked up by evil,” Johnny insists at one point. “You see, Brian, God doesn’t love you. God despises you. . . You see what I’m saying is, basically, you can’t make an omelet without cracking an egg, and humanity is just a cracked egg. And the omelet . . . stinks.”)

Johnny spies a drunken woman in her flat from the office building and, possibly goaded as well as threatened by his sudden kinship with Brian, decides to call on her; she lets him in, and after manhandling her, Johnny finds himself unable to have sex with her and winds up berating and humiliating her as a cover-up. Meanwhile we see Sophie return to her flat and find Jeremy on the sofa; he claims to be the landlord and a friend of Sandra’s, gives a false name, and soon gets Sophie to put on Sandra’s nurse uniform, then rapes her.

Johnny encounters Brian on the street and gets treated to breakfast, after which the waitress (Gina McKee) invites him to the flat she’s subletting. She offers him food, drink, and a bath, then unexpectedly turns on him and throws him out. This happens shortly after he tells her she has a very sad face, provoking her tears, and asks if she has a boyfriend; but she never offers any explanation for her abrupt change of mood — or what might be more accurately described as coming to her senses. Back on the street, Johnny gets a ride from a man putting up posters and starts to help him in his work, but suddenly this person also turns on him, throwing him down, kicking him, and driving off with his bag. Youths in an alley further attack and more seriously injure Johnny, who finally staggers back to Louise’s flat, where Jeremy is still camping out and Sandra is about to return.

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 “Canceled,” 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.

Though Thewlis’s footloose Johnny is far less appealing than Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless – a film Leigh seems to have in the back of his mind, especially at the very beginning and very end of Naked – the sense of a man drifting by wit and instinct through a moral wasteland is equally pronounced. And indeed, just as Martial Solal’s piano jazz in Breathless conveyed the existential urgency propelling Belmondo down his arbitrary yet doom-ridden path, Andrew Dickson’s beautiful, comparably percussive score here — nervous harp arpeggios against mellower and more soulful melodies from the other strings in a staccato pattern — seems to drive the peripatetic hero. (The relentlessly steady pulse and sweet-and-sour mood, if not the texture and instrumentation, are very close to those of Tangerine Dream’s new-age score in Risky Business, implying a similarly ambivalent relation to all the characters and the action.) Such music, like the conclusion of John Updike’s early novel Rabbit, Run, seems predicated on the sense of a burnt-out hero in perpetual flight — though from what and to what is hard to say.

Tito and Me

The chuckling style and nostalgic tone may be pure Neil Simon, but the content of this 1992 autobiographical feature by Goran Markovic is something else again–a fascinating, pointed, satirical look at growing up in Yugoslavia in the mid-50s, obviously given more edge by the fact that it couldn’t have been made until fairly recently. The ten-year-old narrating hero–an overweight worshiper of Marshal Tito sharing a cramped Belgrade apartment with his artistic parents as well as his grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousin–develops a crush on an older girl who’s an orphan. After writing a dutiful essay declaring that he loves Tito more than his own parents, he is selected to go on a camping trip to the ruler’s homeland-and so is the girl. But he hits it off poorly with the tour leader and eventually has some second thoughts about Tito as well. Entertaining and often illuminating, this offers a much more interesting reevaluation of the 50s than most Hollywood equivalents. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 25

through March 3.

I’ll Undo Everything [I’LL DO ANYTHING]

From the February 18, 1994 Chicago Reader. I wrote this before I had a chance to see the film’s original rough cut, when it was still a musical, which I continue to regard as far and away James L. Brooks’ best movie, more than twice as good as what he finally released.. By contrast, the release version remind me of Erich von Stroheim’s comment about the release version of his Foolish Wives: “They are showing only the skeleton if my dead child.” – J.R.

** I’LL DO ANYTHING

(Worth seeing)

Directed and written by James L. Brooks

With Nick Nolte, Whittni Wright, Julie Kavner, Albert Brooks, Joely Richardson, Tracey Ullman, Jeb Brown, and Angela Alvarado.

First riddle: How can a movie about Hollywood professionals also be a movie about learning to be a parent? Answer: When all the Hollywood professionals in the movie act like kids or parents.

However disjointed it felt the first time I saw it, James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything took on a certain conceptual clarity the second time around. What was disconcerting at first — the leapfrogging between characters and, apparently, subjects — became coherent and meaningful once I understood that all the scenes are running variations on the same theme.

On the surface, the story proceeds more or less like this: Idealistic, dedicated, and mainly unemployed New York character actor Matt (Nick Nolte) proposes to his malcontent girlfriend Beth (Tracey Ullman) in Los Angeles in 1980. Seven years later, when their daughter Jeannie is six months old, we can see that Beth is miserable. About six years after that, following their divorce, Matt gets a call from Beth, now living with Jeannie in Georgia, informing him that he has to take his daughter for three weeks. After testing unsuccessfully for a part at Popcorn Pictures, where he renews his acquaintance with a young studio executive named Cathy (Joely Richardson), Matt winds up getting hired as a driver by the head producer, Burke (Albert Brooks). At a test-marketing preview he sees Cathy again and also befriends Nan (Julie Kavner), an audience-opinion researcher and single parent who’s becoming involved with Burke.

Matt discovers when he arrives in Georgia that he has to take Jeannie semipermanently because Beth is going to prison. Back in Hollywood, he struggles to control his bratty, unruly child, leaving her with a Hispanic neighbor while he drives Burke to previews. Cathy finally persuades Burke to let her develop her favorite project, a remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and test Matt for the lead. When Matt goes over to Cathy’s house to read the script, she seduces him, but their lovemaking is interrupted by a string of phone messages on her answering machine, including one from Jeannie. While Matt’s taking his screen test Jeannie, waiting for him on the lot, gets cast in a multiracial TV show; meanwhile we catch glimpses of Nan’s unhappy affair with Burke . . .

This isn’t the whole plot — though I’ll be getting to more of that eventually, so let readers beware — but it’s enough to give you some notion of the overall form. As I’ve described it so far, the movie concentrates on four duos — Matt and Beth, Matt and Jeannie, Matt and Cathy, Burke and Nan — whose relationships are more personal than professional, and a few secondary and less dynamic duos, like Matt and Burke, Matt and Nan, and Cathy and Burke, whose relationships are more professional than personal. If we can’t figure out what making movies and being a father have to do with each other — a mystery likely to distract us on a first viewing — the fact that everyone generally behaves like a kid or a parent in every scene, whether the relationship is personal or professional, ultimately explains it. That Brooks has a daughter the same age as Jeannie undoubtedly motivates the connection he draws between moviemaking and parenting, and shows how personal his filmmaking tends to be; but justifying the connection is another matter.

We first see only mothers — Beth is clearly a bad one, Nan is clearly a good one, and Cathy is potentially a good mother, both to Jeannie and to Matt. (Also clearly a good mother is the neighbor, but she’s a less developed character.) All the men — Matt, Burke, and a snotty unnamed development executive (a “D person,” in industry lingo) — are clearly infants, and in the movie’s precise moral coding Matt is good, the D person is terminally bratty, and Burke is bratty but lovable. Jeannie, of course, falls into the bratty-but-potentially-good category. The remainder of the movie describes how Matt, Burke, and Cathy gradually assume their parental roles and Jeannie goes from being bratty to good.

I know this sounds awfully simpleminded, but we have to remember that Brooks owes his artistic formation to TV. (Among the many shows he’s been associated with are The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Tracey Ullman Show, Lou Grant, Rhoda, Taxi, and The Simpsons.) And to give him some credit, what would be simpleminded in a movie about parents and children is a little bit more interesting and subtle in a movie about Hollywood professionals — even if Brooks’s underlining of dramatic points still sometimes smacks of TV. When Matt tries unsuccessfully to discipline Jeannie on a plane trip, there’s an elaborate and wholly unnecessary camera movement leading to a close-up of him saying to a flight attendant, “I have no idea what to do.” On the other hand, Brooks’s sense of character is masterful. After leaving Jeannie with the neighbor, Matt hears crying and runs back, but is delighted to find that the crying comes from the neighbor’s little boy and not Jeannie. Brooks’s deft counterpointing of Matt’s childish delight with the neighbor’s maternal consternation about his response, all in a matter of seconds, is a pleasure — and offers an early clue that first impressions count for a lot in this movie. (Equally clever, one should add, are the characters’ apartments, which should probably be credited in part to coproducer Polly Platt’s feeling for dressing a set

Brooks also compares the professional and the personal in his last feature, the 1987 Broadcast News, set in Washington, D.C. — although there the characters behave more like siblings than like parents and children. In I’ll Do Anything the parallels between Washington and Hollywood are drawn by Nan, who moved to Hollywood from Washington: she has a speech early on about what the two company towns have in common, such as “overprivileged people” crazed by the fear of “losing their privileges,” alcoholism, betrayal, and “spiritual bloodletting.”

Second riddle: How can one be moralistic about morally ambiguous businesses, like mainstream journalism and entertainment, while remaining a part of those businesses? Answer: By focusing on the morality of personal decisions on the middle-management level and ignoring decisions made on the corporate level.

Both Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything revolve around a moment when a performer is called upon to produce tears. In the earlier film, these tears are fake ones produced by a newscaster (William Hurt) while giving a report about date rape, and the producer (Holly Hunter) who’s about to run off with him on a tryst changes her mind when she learns from a friend (Albert Brooks again), the newscaster’s romantic rival, about the tears being faked. Broadcast News isn’t concerned with whether the news report was accurate or insightful in other ways; it simply joins the producer in her utter scorn for this corrupt behavior.

In I’ll Do Anything Jeannie knows she’ll be called upon to cry in the TV show she’s working on and is afraid she won’t be able to. Matt tells her there are only two ways to do it — to think of something that really makes her sad or to forget that she’s pretending — and at the climactic moment Jeannie opts for the former. In this case, producing tears on demand is seen as an unambiguous good, whether or not the TV show is defensible (a nonissue in the movie) and despite the fact that on more than one occasion Jeannie has manipulated her father by crying.

All this may seem to make Brooks an exemplar of the double standard, but it’s hard to simply dismiss him with the moral confidence he so often shows toward his own characters. When all is said and done, he still has an artist’s quirks and reflexes and can’t be written off as a hack. In all three of his features — the first was Terms of Endearment — he seems to put a TV frame around everything, then puts a movie frame around that: more than any other American director he embodies the contradictions of being an ambitious mass-media artist, precisely because of his reliance on such dialectical moves. Deliberately or not, he winds up deconstructing many of his own most questionable decisions: as J. Hoberman notes in the Village Voice (in a mainly unfavorable review), “So much is made of [Jeannie’s inability to cry on demand] that it’s an unavoidably Brechtian moment when she does,” and much the same could be said of many similarly self-reflexive elements in this picture.

In her comparison of Washington and Los Angeles Nan might have added that the media in both towns are run as meat markets — a point made in both Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything, though both movies fail to follow through on the implications. As morality plays, the pictures are similar, with Matt assigned some of the characteristics of Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in Broadcast News and Cathy assigned the villainous William Hurt part. Infuriatingly, in both films director Brooks blindly and abjectly accepts the worst everyday crimes of both TV news and Hollywood yet is self-righteously indignant at minor personal infractions. Thus he can be completely blasé about news shows’ most significant lies — crass ideological emphases and distortions — but furious when a newscaster fakes tears, which in the grander scheme of things can’t have many or even any important social consequences. Similarly, Brooks is cool about some of the worst sentimentalities and corruptions of movies (a 90s remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, or an executive trying to cast her lover in a big part) but burbles with rage about a momentary failure to follow through on a personal commitment — that is, the failure to openly support a lover as a commercial sex object during an executive meeting. Commercial sex objectification, on the other hand, is never questioned.

Brooks never considers the possibility that Matt might be wrong for the lead quite apart from whether women in the audience want to sleep with him or not. More on his mind is the meat market — a preoccupation that also informs Hurt’s ascendancy as a newscaster over Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. In I’ll Do Anything this preoccupation takes on unstated ethnic implications in the comic scenes between Burke and Nan, hinging on the way Jewish styles of behavior (suggesting a west-coast version of Woody Allen) exclude them from mainstream notions of glamour and beauty.

In the scene that comes closest to defying meat-market mentality, Matt flies into a very touching rage when he overhears the D person deliver an abusive litany of epithets while criticizing a colleague’s list of possible cast members for a movie: among others, “Ed Harris — losing his hair,” “Jeff Daniels — beanpole,” “Tommy Lee Jones — very unfortunate skin,” “James Spader — vanilla, vanilla, vanilla,” and “Raul Julia — bug eyes.” The gist of Matt’s response (”God, man, where did they find you?”), delivered in a stammering Method-acting manner meant to convey authenticity, entails a similar kind of total rejection, but the fact that Matt rejects the executive’s style rather than his physical appearance makes the rejection much more palatable from a humanistic standpoint. By contrast the D person’s griping comes close to the master-race brand of criticism, practiced most famously by film and theater critic John Simon. (And this kind of criticism doesn’t exist only in the mainstream: I’ll never forget a Village Voice review of a few years back that unabashedly dismissed the lead actress in an independent feature because her nose was “too big.”)

Despite Brooks’s apparent hatred for this mentality, his Manichaean tendency to divvy up his characters into saints and sinners, with no options for redemption or a fall from grace (perhaps a legacy of his TV background), leads to judgments nearly as monolithic. Characteristically oversimplifying, he establishes that Nan’s medications — antidepressants, plus pills for the side effects, plus pills to counteract those pills –add up to some kind of truth serum, which makes her incapable of telling a lie; and given the movie’s TV notion of the “truth,” we’re implicitly asked to assume that she can’t have “inaccurate” opinions. When at a climactic juncture she feels called upon to deliver a clinching moral verdict about Cathy to Cathy — that Matt is simply too good for her — we’re obviously meant to applaud and agree. At this point Cathy considerately vanishes from the scene — and the movie — for good, and Jeannie, skillful tear faker, effectively takes over as leading lady. (The fact that Jeannie, played by hammy five-year-old Whittni Wright, wears earrings even before her TV debut is the kind of material the movie never addresses. Are the earrings her idea, Beth’s, or Matt’s? None of these answers seems plausible.)

Third riddle: When is a movie not the work of a moviemaker? Answer: After it gets test marketed.

It’s been widely reported — even in the film’s official publicity, which may be a first — that I’ll Do Anything started out as a musical with a much longer running time, but that unsympathetic previews led Brooks to delete all the songs except for about half of one of them. Presumably we’re supposed to forget all that when we sit down to watch the picture, but I doubt many of us can. I’ve tried to honor this principle up to this point, ignoring this facet of the movie and treating the work on its own terms. Yet it’s impossible to deny that I’ll Do Anything felt incomplete as a comedy both times I saw it — not surprisingly, because in terms of how it was written and originally filmed it is incomplete, and all the recutting and reshooting in the world won’t make it otherwise. For all the film’s intermittent brilliance, the quality of the performances ranges from stridently awful (Ullman) to standard-issue sitcom (Kavner) to resourceful and lively (Nolte and Richardson) to cartoon gargoyle posing (Albert Brooks), and Wright runs the gamut of these extremes in nearly every scene. Whether the movie made more sense, eccentric or otherwise, before it got test marketed into its present state of choppiness is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to imagine it didn’t.

I doubt that there are many things in Hollywood more ruinous to movies than the principle of mob rule that lies behind test marketing. It’s inconceivable that a movie like Citizen Kane could have survived previews, and the same could be said of any movie that steps off the beaten path and can’t be absorbed without a moment’s reflection. Though previewing movies makes sense in determining how to publicize them, previewing them to determine how to make them seems more a form of hysteria than a form of business or art — yet most industry reporters treat test marketing as if it were a hallowed, proven science rather than a high-tech form of fortune-telling. (Remember, these are the soothsayers who reported that The War of the Roses would flop.) This practice epitomizes the short-term, kamikaze Reaganite approach to economics, which has driven this country into terminal debt. Declaring a movie a hit or a bust even before its opening weekend is fully compatible with making decisions on the basis of hastily arrived at, “definitive” projections and spinelessly junking long-term strategies.

If any proof were needed that previewing is largely a joke, a story in the December 17, 1993, Wall Street Journal, “Film Flam? Movie-Research Kingpin Is Accused by Former Employees of Selling Manipulated Data,” offers plenty of confirmation. Though Joseph Farrell of National Research Group Inc., the firm handling most Hollywood test marketing — including the kind we see in I’ll Do Anything — denies the accusations, the story reports that about two dozen former employees “ranging from hourly workers to senior officials,” mostly people who left the firm voluntarily, claim that the research data is sometimes doctored to conform to what clients want. (All the examples in the story involve boosting a movie’s score, as with Teen Wolf, L.A. Story, and The Godfather, Part III. But one can well imagine the deck being stacked the other way when studios perversely want certain good films to fail — most recently and blatantly, Paramount and The Thing Called Love and Warner Brothers and The Body Snatchers.)

It’s characteristic of Brooks that he believes so religiously in test marketing that he tore the guts out of his own movie to prove his faith. But what has he proved? If he wants to show his conviction, perhaps he should credit his preview audiences, not to mention advance reviewers, as codirectors and coeditors. But personally I feel cheated and more than a little insulted: why should the reflexes of preview audiences be carved in stone, thereby determining my own long-term experience of the movie?

As it stands, I’ll Do Anything is full of scenes that promise emotional release and don’t deliver it. Stories in the press make it plain that most of these — a scene between Burke and Nan in a restaurant, and another of Matt and Cathy conversing over car phones — originally featured songs. Obviously the preview audiences didn’t respond well to these, or to nonsingers like Kavner and Nolte singing — just as many people I know, including some critics, don’t like Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons singing in Guys and Dolls (1955), though I happen to find it both sexy and moving. It’s possible that I wouldn’t like the songs in I’ll Do Anything, but I’d much rather dislike them than dislike their absence — not to mention dislike the audiences whose passing fancies determined my permanent lack of choice in the matter.

Strange Weather

The fascinating thing about this 50-minute documentary (1993) by Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser — about the everyday lives of four Miami crackheads, three women and a man — is the offbeat intimacy they create with their imaginative and resourceful use of a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera. The crackheads are mainly glimpsed goofing off, talking about themselves, and trying to coax money out of family and friends during a severe hurricane. {2011 postscript: I’ve belatedly discovered, from Ahwesh herself, that this is in fact a pseudodocumentary in which the four characters weren’t crackheads at all.] On the same program, Ahwesh’s short film From Romance to Ritual (1985), a personal documentary involving travels and friends in England as well as some ancient history. Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, Friday, February 18, 8:00, 384-5533.

Naked

Brilliant, problematic, and hyperbolic, Mike Leigh’s postapocalyptic look at post-Thatcher England may look like allegory, but only because the picaresque story line, this time involving lone individuals rather than families, seems to sprawl more randomly than usual (which, incidentally, makes the customary clash of acting styles all the more glaring). What passes for a plot involves the restless, random movements of a working-class pontificator on the dole who’s visiting his former girlfriend in London, to no clear purpose, and a number of the people he encounters, including his former girlfriend’s roommate, a homeless couple, a philosophical night watchman, and a couple of women who take him in. We also periodically follow a similarly misogynistic, sadistic yuppie whose path eventually crosses the hero’s; it’s here that Leigh’s occasional weakness for caricature seems most obvious. Though far from perfect, this film is galvanizing and disturbing, powerfully acted and teasingly unresolved. With David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Peter Wight, and Greg Cruttwell. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 18 through 24.