Review: DON JON

DON JON  (Romantic-Comedy)
3.5 out of 4 stars
Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Rob Brown, Brie Larson
R for strong graphic sexual material and dialogue throughout, nudity, language and some drug use.
Verdict: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's writing/directing debut is a highly-engaging and stylish bit of filmmaking that promises a strong directorial career to follow.  While his directorial style is impressive, the script is a bit weaker in comparison, but everything else, from the excellent performances, interesting ideas and great humor make up for those flaws healthily.  It's also an impressive display of how much adult material that can be crammed into an R-rated film, when the established system has rendered the NC-17 rating impractical.
YOU MAY ENJOY DON JON IF YOU LIKED:
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012)
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (2009)
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT (2010)
THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN (2005)

Disclaimer:  Due to the adult nature of subject matter dealt with in the film reviewed in this post, some of this essay involves mature material.




Jon Martello is a modern-day Don Juan with an unusually well-ordered life.  After all, there are only a few things he cares about in life:

"There's only a few things I really care about in life.  My body.  My pad.  My ride. My family.  My church.  My boys.  My girls.  My porn."

With these words Jon, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (also writing and directing) introduces himself, and by default, the setup of the movie, DON JON.  These eight things are what Jon devotes his time to, and everything that happens during the movie involves at least one of them, usually a few of them.  One, in particular though, is really, really special to him; his porn.  He loves the stuff, to the point where he points out that even the start-up tone of his laptop gets him excited.  He works out every day, cleans his place up, drives from place to place under a cloud of boiling road rage, has dinner with his family, hangs out with friends at the clubs and picks up women for one-night stands.  His nickname with his friends, his "boys," is Don Jon, or the Don, for his impeccable ability to hook up with a "10" almost every weekend.  No matter how many beautiful women Jon has sex with though, he always returns to his porn.  He's not shy about his opinions on the matter either.  Porn, for him, is better than the real thing, all the time.  He watches it daily, without fail, and masturbates ritualistically, often several times in a day.  For him, it's a virtue.  Then, every Sunday, he joins his family at Mass, confesses his weekly dose of watching and masturbating to dozens of pornographic videos and a few extramarital sexual relations, gets his prescription of prayers for Penance, and says them during his daily gym workouts.  All like clockwork.
DON JON is about how all this begins to work out with two new women in his life; the first is Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a voluptuous woman who Jon tries to pick up at the club one night but begins dating regularly.  She's got her own addiction to fiction in the form of formulaic Hollywood romances, which Jon detests, but takes her to and does his best to live up to the expectations that she takes away from them, because she's the girl of his dreams.  The second woman is Esther (Julianne Moore), a vulnerable and inappropriately forward middle-aged classmate at the night class that Jon goes to a Barbara's behest.  Barbara simply will not stand for Jon watching porn, and after she catches him once, it almost destroys their relationship then and there before Jon manages to convince her that it was a one-time thing that a friend e-mailed to him.  But porn is still his "true love" (of sorts), and he discovers the wonderful advances in mobile streaming, and watches porn on his phone in his car, out and about and even in class, which Esther catches him doing, but responds far less dramatically than Barbara, albeit, without an ounce of tact.  From here, it all plays out, sometimes as expected, and at other times, quite unexpectedly.
DON JON is primarily a story about objectification, and especially, how commercial industry affect our perceptions and feeling about ourselves and our fellow human beings.  The way Jon runs his life and lists off the things that he cares about reveals the way he classifies all these things together, as things, including his best friends, his parents and sister, and the women he has sexual intimacy with, all lumped together stuff like his car, his apartment and pornography.  This can be a tricky subject to deal with, but Gordon-Levitt handles it deftly, without passing judgement or being preachy.  While the pornography issue is dealt with up front, there are many other commentaries that are made with greater subtlety, such as a brief moment when Jon notices a couple of magazines aimed at teenage girls in the checkout line at the grocery store.  This objectification of other people and sexuality pervades life, and it transcends boundaries of gender, age and class.  If you're hoping for a conservative and completely condemning message about the effects of pornography however, then this movie isn't for you.  It still has a decidedly liberal opinion about such sexual matters.

Fear not; DON JON does not condone this style.

Barbara, likewise to Jon, is hindered in her ability to connect with other people, due to her inability to differentiate her feeling about love in real life and love in her favorite romantic movies (Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum have amusing cameos as the stars of a movie Barbara drags Jon along to).  And both Barbara and Jon are hypocrites about the other's passionate hobby, Jon bemoaning the fake cliches and formula of Barbara's movies, while Barbara blasts the smutty, cheapening of sexual intimacy in Jon's porn, but neither is able to see that their own hobby is an artificial form of sexuality that they've each let pervade the way they handle their own lives.  Barbara turns relationships into an attempt to mold her boyfriends into the leading men of her favorite movies, and Jon has turned his sexual encounters into a one-sided event where he's having sex, but not with the person he's with.  They're two people who have isolated themselves by objectifying the people around them.
The acting on display here is top-notch, with Gordon-Levitt's charisma anchoring the film with energy to match his direction (not to mention making a pretty douche-y character endearing), Johansson perfectly channeling the high-tension dream girl Barbara, and Tony Danza as Jon's sexist, bonehead dad, who reflects Jon and the past that's brought him to what he is now.  Moore isn't playing a character much different from what she's done many times before, but she plays it well enough, and her middle-aged twist on the "quirky girl" cliche is occasionally amusing, and on in at least one moment, tragic.

There's never a dull moment in DON JON, but it's most notable of a few weaknesses is how Gordon-Levitt's flair for stylish, quick-cutting direction outplays the strengths of his script.  On it's own, the script is perfectly serviceable, but it doesn't quite live up to the standards of his potential as a director.  That doesn't mean he's not a good writer, but if he plans to direct his own scripts in the future, he could do even better with a bit further polishing at the writing stage.  If he returns with as much or more strength in his next behind-the-camera effort, whatever that might be, Gordon-Levitt is sure to join the ranks of Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck as actors who have found even greater success as directors.
On a side note, DON JON acts as an incredible testament to the level of adult content that can be gotten away with within an R rating when "morality watchdog groups" have pressured a system to all but eliminate NC-17 rated films, where film exhibition unions rarely permit the screening of NC-17-rated films and major studio contractually require rating below the NC-17.  Because the rating is practically forbidden, stories that are otherwise best suited for such a rating are specifically crafted to remove the absolute bare minimum of "objectionable" content whilst leaving all the rest intact, which is something that DON JON does masterfully.  Even still, it's bewildering that this film managed to get an R rating, while actual pornographic clips appear frequently throughout the film.  Never are genitalia visible in the clips, but that hardly leaves much to the imagination anyway, and while I'm not saying that that content doesn't belong in the film, because it is relevant and well-suited to the film's purposes, I can't imagine why a parent would necessitate the option of bringing their child into a movie so specifically crafted for adult viewing.