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| Copyright: Relativity Media |
If you look at the façade of this movie, you might decide
it’s about porn. Its main character is a New Jersey resident and a single
bartender named Jon who loves only a few things in life: his friends, his car,
his apartment, his muscles, his church, his one night stands with very
attractive women he doesn’t know and his porn. He often has sex after he picks
up girls in nightclubs, but admits to himself that only porn and masturbation
in front of his laptop gives him the opportunity to lose himself.
The plot is simple as it sounds. Jon, played by Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, is satisfied with his life, but at the same time, perplexed why
real sex with beautiful women (every one of them gets at least an eight on his
ten-point-scale) doesn’t give him the same kick as porn does. Soon, he meets
Barbara (played by Scarlett Johansson), a clear ten on his scale, who isn’t
willing to become just another stranger Don welcomes to his apartment. Instead,
she forces him to revise his way of life, and Don accepts. Yet still, porn
prevails.
First of all Scarlett Johansson should be congratulated for
one of her best roles in recent years. She is stunningly beautiful and aware of
her sexual allure, while at the same time she constantly presents an almost
stereotypical “Jersey girl” who is always chewing gum and does many things
straight from a calmer episode of the Jersey Shore. Her character is seemingly
simple, but gets more layers as Don tries to find a soul mate (and sex mate) in
her. Johansson upheld Barbara in every step, and I hope she gets some big award
nominations for her role. Julianne Moore, who plays the other important woman
in Jon’s life, gives a solid effort, but pales in comparison.
The movie isn’t about addiction, or the horrors of jerking
off to a porn website. It examines how the modern era, where children (both
sexes) grew up with a specific world view, shaped their expectation on
everything, including sex. The pornographic industry isn’t a scapegoat in this
film; it’s just something that is around. Instead, the film focuses on the
attitude of Jon, and it presents him as a regular person who somehow got
alienated from the natural way of making love. The story actually chronicles
the development of his new grounded sexuality, through pleasant and unpleasant
experiences.
I was amazed how accurately Don Jon captured the current
phenomenon of porn, without making it a subculture thing or generalizing in any
way. It’s a stark contrast to films that try to make their whole plot about
modern technology and the way it shapes our lives, like the movie The SocialNetwork, and for me, fail completely. I believe it’s because Gordon-Levitt, who
also wrote the movie and directed it, really can connect to the occurrences of
people enjoying porn more than real sex. He saw his generation migrate during
childhood from Playboy magazines to VHS tapes and then to the glorious internet
access, where porn became infinite. In The Social Network, David Fincher (who’s
also a terrific director) was already in his forties when Facebook had been
launched. It was clear to see that he simply didn’t have a way to relate to his
topic, while Gordon-Levitt does that with ease.
The only visible downside in the directorial approach is the
repetitive sequences – Don goes to the gym where he prays for repentance of his
sins which involve sexual intercourse out-of-wedlock, masturbation and
pornography watching, then he goes back home and cleans his apartment, and then
he drives to church, and so on. I get that the idea was to show his life, but
Gordon-Levitt pushed it too far and gained nothing by it. I don’t believe that
the concept was flawed; just that he overdid it (going for, let’s say, four or
five repetitive cycles, and showing one too many). This seems to me as a rookie
mistake, maybe because the editing crew subconsciously wanted to extend the run
time of the film (the ending credits start to roll after 84 minutes). But for a
first time director, in spite of this, Don Jon is most definitely golden.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt created a light-hearted movie about the
evolution of sexuality through the perspective of a man who doesn’t inspire to
achieve greatness in any way. Instead, he just wants to find love that doesn’t
include a computer monitor. It drives the audience by laughs, but is actually a
serious drama about finding oneself in sex, even when sex is plentiful.
