Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s acting career is pretty rapidly starting to reach legendary status, and he’s still super young. Just recently he’s embodied a metalhead character who was worthy of becoming a thing of myth, he’s made us feel the full gamut of emotions one struggles through while fighting cancer, he’s made a movie about a bike messenger that was somehow not annoying, and he’s successfully emoted through Bruce Willis’ unwieldy jaw and forehead. Unsatisfied with just being on a quick march toward becoming one of the most respected actors on the planet, however, Gordon-Levitt has decided that he needs to impress further by writing and directing his first feature. Just in case you didn’t get the point that he’s more talented than you and you should feel bad (though it doesn’t seem that he went as far as to pick out his own brilliantly disgusting clothing for the movie, as Leah Katznelson is the costume designer who’s been credited with that particular piece of genius).
Said feature that he’s created is called Don Jon, and it’s a movie that he also stars in. Here he plays the title character of Jon, who’s a young Italian gentleman from New Jersey whose life mostly consists of working out, going to church, pulling random girls out of clubs for one night stands, having Sunday dinners with his family, and masturbating to Internet pornography as often as possible. That’s the thing. By all indications Jon is wildly addicted to pornography, and this becomes a point of contention once he falls in love with a demanding girl (Scarlett Johansson) who is wildly against the idea of him watching it. Given the fact that this is the first time he’s been in love, he tries his best to appease her, but eventually it’s obvious that something has to give. And thus we have a movie.
The two big questions going into this movie were whether or not Gordon-Levitt would be able to pull off playing a beefed up Jersey guido and why he would choose to write a role for himself where he had to pull off playing a beefed up Jersey guido in the first place. I didn’t get long into the film until the answer to the first questions was clearly a resounding yes, so perhaps the answer to the second question is just that he did it because he wanted to show off? Regardless, the acting in Don Jon is strong across the board, and ends up being one of the big selling points of the film.
Probably Scarlett Johansson fares the worst of the cast, as her heavily accented, spoiled princess character comes off as being something of a cartoon character, but she still naturally radiates so much power and presence that it’s a lot of fun to watch her and Gordon-Levitt bounce off of each other anyway. The rest of the supporting cast is both hilarious and authentic though, especially Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, and Brie Larson as Jon’s parents and sister. At one moment they’re wildly entertaining going broad as a caricature of a modern Italian family, and then they turn on a dime and become relatable people projecting real emotions—all without it ever feeling muddled or confused. It’s like some sort of magic act. And speaking of magic, just the sight of Tony Danza as a loud, undershirted dad is somehow magically hilarious. Crowds absolutely love him in this. It wouldn’t be surprising if this role led to something of a career resurgence for him.
The big reason Don Jon is able to be so successful is that Gordon-Levitt’s script doesn’t allow it to be a simple romantic comedy or a drama about the struggle against porn addiction. There are layers of themes and ideas here that keep you engaged past the surface plot concerns. Not only does the film make a pretty convincing argument for why modern sex kind of sucks and isn’t worth all of the hassle it takes to engage in it—which is an uncomfortable truth that we’ve let go largely unaddressed as a culture—but it also does quite a bit to bring to life how much the over-sexualization of the media affects our states of being on a daily basis. Everywhere Jon looks there are images of butts and boobs and pouty bimbos that assault him from every screen and magazine cover that he comes across. How is anyone supposed to focus on anything other than sex when overtly sexual images are waved in front of everyone’s faces all day every day? Throw all of that subliminal priming on top of all of the unrealistic, often unhealthy depictions of sex that are so readily available to us in pornography and it has to be creating some sort of perfect storm of insanity that’s going to lead us to ruin. There’s just an inherent dissolution of society that’s bound to happen when we stop viewing each other as people and become trained to only view others as obstacles in front of or tools to achieve base, narcissistic pleasures, isn’t there? Anyway, without jettisoning any of its entertainment factor and becoming preachy, these are the questions that Don Jon manages to raise, and these are the things it will have you thinking about as you walk out of the theater. And any time you walk out of a theater thinking, that’s probably a good sign.
The other thing the film does really well is fit its multiple plot threads into a structure that affords them the opportunity to develop well and eventually mean something. There are multiple mini-dramas here in addition to the main ones—Jon’s attempts to get assigned less Hail Marys from the priest he confesses to, his escalating road rage whenever he drives somewhere, his attempts to resist booting up his computer and looking at porn—and they all weave together well enough that they combine to create the larger character development that Jon goes through. The reason they work so well is that there’s quite a bit of repetition in the script that helps to establish the world and orient us in it. Jon is a very regimented character who sticks to a very particular routine. Said routine gets established and re-established early and often, so whenever we see even a slight variation in it we know that something important has happened that’s going to have huge repercussions regarding who our main character is going to be going forward. The film understands that all we need to do is pay attention to follow the character growth, and that we don’t need to have our hands held and for everything to be explained to us overtly. What joy. Don Jon is funny too. And you might think that, given the porn-heavy concept, it goes for bottom of the barrel wiener jokes and whatnot, but it doesn’t at all. All of the humor is character based and clever. Delightful.
A big catharsis that Jon experiences in the third act of the film seems to come quite a bit too easily, and there’s a scene that involves Swiffer mops that plays as being overblown and overly crafted, so Don Jon isn’t quite a film that you can walk away from without having any complaints though. Not that very many are. Overall, Don Jon is a movie that’s most certainly worth your time. Make sure that you see it. Its success is likely an important step toward Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s path toward the Presidency.
