One of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s motivations in writing and directing the feature film Don Jon must have been the opportunity to provide himself with a wildly different character than he’s accustomed to playing.
The creature he inhabits for the film’s 90 minutes is a far cry from the sensitive hipsters he’s cultivated over his career. He stars in the film as Jon, so called “Don” because of his propensity to bed a new woman every night. A muscle-bound, chauvinistic bro with frequent road rage issues, he lives in New Jersey, and seems to be a fictional embodiment of Jersey Shore’s The Situation, from the crew cut to the permanently chipped shoulder to his priorities in life: “My body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, my porn.”
It’s this latter aspect of Jon’s life that is his most consuming, and it’s where Gordon-Levitt, as writer and director, aims his sharpest critique. Jon is a chronic porn-watcher – before, immediately following and, if he could swing it, during sex. He argues a common line spouted by porn addicts: that not even the best real-life sex tops the one-sided fantasy of the porn starlet. Every Sunday, he makes an incongruous appearance at his Catholic Church, confessing his sins – “Since last Sunday I’ve masturbated to pornography 22 times and had sex out of wedlock 17 times” – before resuming his hedonistic lifestyle.
Jon is a sexist pig whose comeuppance is inevitable, but his journey toward salvation is both complex and unpredictable. He meets the woman who might just straighten him out in Scarlett Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman, apparently the only specimen at the club who won’t give away the milk for free. He starts a real, monogamous relationship with her, except for the whole porn thing, which eventually becomes a problem.
Porn addiction is still something of a third rail in mainstream movies. It’s an untapped character flaw, ripe for serious exploration. Many more men have watched porn when they shouldn’t have, for instance, than have snorted cocaine, but drug addiction is vastly more represented on the big screen. Don Jon deserves a lot of credit for broaching this addiction with verisimilitude; it’s a film that makes countless salient points about the deleterious effects of porn on intimacy, on sexual expectations, on taste and proclivities in the bedroom. As the film progresses, the laughter that accompanied much of Jon’s male-fantasy lifestyle recedes as his sexual chickens come home to roost, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie inspired many uncomfortable conversations between couples on the ride home.
Johansson smolders here as usual, with Gordon-Levitt playing off her irrepressible sexuality, tempered slightly by a less-than-sonorous Joysey dialect. Gordon-Levitt wisely portrays her as a damaged character herself, not Jon’s faultless messiah; she’s good for him, but she also seeks to control him – to mold him in her image – and her own hang-ups are readily apparent.
As a director and storyteller, Gordon-Levitt is an acolyte of Scorsese – note his protagonist’s GoodFellas-like voice-over narration and his boisterous Italian-American family, led by an amusing Tony Danza. Gordon-Levitt’s taste for rapid montages, edited with Thelma Schoonmaker-like elegance, helps to turn Jon’s daily routines into a building block of repetition just waiting to be toppled: Wake up, make bed, hop in ride, hit gym, shout at motorist, walk to church, confess, prowl for hottie at club, take her home, fornicate, beat off, wash, rinse, repeat. It’s a pattern of self-gratification and self-defeat that even Barbara’s presence refuses to alter in the slightest; the only disruption comes is the form of Julianne Moore’s Esther, the woman in his night class (because Barbara wanted him in such a course) who deigns to speak to him honestly.
Despite the chiseled exterior, Jon may not be so far removed from the trait that has come to define so many Gordon-Levitt characters: hidden vulnerability. The actor has become a master at gradually illuminating this vulnerability, and his Don Jon is no exception. If the superior Shame, Steve McQueen’s grim portrayal of a sex-addicted mind, feels more cynically tethered to real life, Don Jon’s few Hollywood concessions don’t damage the profound truths that emerge around them.
DON JON. Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Brie Larson; Distributor: Relativity Media; Rated R; Opens today at most area theaters