Review: ‘Don Jon’

This Joseph Gordon-Levitt guy, who does he think he is, what with the writing and the directing and the starring and what not. Know what I mean? This was the long hair doofy kid on “3rd Rock From the Sun” slash that orphan kid that saw Doc Brown as an angel in “Angels in the Outfield,” and now here he is writing and directing and starring in “Don Jon,” his own movie in which he gets to write his character having sex with many women, Scarlett Johansson being chief among them, and this guy even admits he wrote this with Johansson in mind! He set out to make a movie in which he beds ScarJo, and he succeeded! Like I said! Who does he think he is?!

Well he’s a damn genius that’s what he is, at least in that department. But surely the reason she even did the movie was because ot its strong, character-centric story which tries to break the typical rom-com mold, being much more upfront and real about sex and people’s sexual wants versus their sexual needs, with the added spin of internet pornography (and porn in general) being an obstacle for a character to get over and not just the source for some cheap “American Pie” style humor.

Instead it is a pretty focused story about a guy named Jon who makes it ABUNDANTLY clear that the only things he cares about are his body, his pad, his ride, his family, his church, his boys, his girls and his porn.

Yeah, he lists porn as one of his “things.” Not too many people are that open about how much they love their porn. Or are there?

Anyway, so he loves all of these things, but it’s almost all superficial. His body is his body, and it’s one thing to work out in order to stay healthy, that’s cool, but Jon works out to look good so he can get laid, that’s fo sho. And he keeps his pad clean but surely he just wants a good looking place to bring home the chicks he’s looking for. Of course his car is also for attracting the females, and maybe a little for compensation purposes. His family, finally, is not about him getting laid. But his mother’s insistence on Job settling down and his apparent distance from his sister don’t seem to be doing him any favors in the female relations department, at least emotionally speaking.

The way Jon leans on church is a joke, and represents an unhealthy population of the church going population, specifically the people who see church as an obligation, just a game to be played in which counting sins and prayers week to week matters in the greater scheme, as opposed to being a pursuit for a better life and a better world. He also listens at the top of his “sins” list for confession how many times he had sex that week and how many times he masturbated to porn. At times some of these latter numbers are…alarming, to say the least. As for his boys, he really only has two friends, and for the most part they are just enablers, content to shout at the top of their lungs about Jon’s streak of bedding strange women between ranking ladies in night clubs on a scale of 1 to 10. And of course this is all about the girls, the ones he takes home on a weekly basis for unfulfilling sex because sex is completely ruined for him because of porn. Jon watches so much damn porn that real sex doesn’t match up to what he sees on the screen and in his mind and doesn’t live up to his expectations, and it’s also making him kind of terrible in bed.

And then he meets Barbara and he is so smitten that she makes him work for it and he jumps through as many hoops as possible just to be close to this chick, and it kind of looks like love, as it turns into an actual relationship, but of course this is a movie, so this has to be a bad relationship, and soon old Don Jon realizes he doesn’t even know what he wants from a steady girl, let alone from his previously steady yet unsatisfying one night stands.

Enter the old witch with sage advice. Well that’s kind of mean. Actually it’s Julianne Moore. She’s awesome. Everyone loves Julianne Moore. But she plays this older lady, seems kinda ex-hippieish, who meets Jon at night college and this second half of the movie takes a more dramatic turn when she appears, as her character forces Jon to confront a lot of things about himself, things that are kind of heavy on a personal level, and this movie doesn’t shy away from this stuff (I’m talking about the porn stuff and sex stuff) and instead faces a lot of it head on, which makes for a pretty compelling movie.

There are a few missed opportunities in this movie. There is a nice connection made between internet porn and typical Hollywood bullshit rom-coms, but it’s not explored much beyond Jon yelling “they’re the same thing!” and Barbara yelling “no they ain’t!” And there’s also a bit in the movie in which Jon vultures a chick that one of his friends was trying to hook up with, and this little exchange went by with no consequence, it didn’t effect their friendship one bit. Was it included as a comedy bit? Because it was a dick movie by Jon and his friend is a loser for just letting it happen and then being cool with Jon they next time they hang out like nothing happened.

“Don Jon” is pretty good stuff, definitely a strong first-feature film showing a promising start to what is surely going to be a rather lengthy creative career for ol’ JGL.