Meet Jon. Jon favours an uncomplicated existence. He likes his car, his crib, his family, his church. He likes his girls too – the hotter, the better. He rates them from One to Don, and when he is out on the pull with his men, he has no intention of heading home with anything less than a Don. He succeeds more often than not, too.
Oh, and did I say he likes his porn? Oh, he does. Jon really likes his porn. It’s a bit odd, given that Jon has his choice – or, at least, he believes he has his choice – of the best that womankind has to offer. But even that, it seems isn’t always enough.
Don Jon is an intermittently interesting, occasionally thoughtful but ultimately an unfulfilling experience. Joseph Gordon-Levitt – both as director, in his debut behind the camera, as well as starring as the titular Don Jon – props up an observant portrait of young manhood. Certainty and compartmentalisation is very much the order of the day in Jon’s world, with everything in its right place. Thus the pornography: it is the simplest path to commitment-free wish fulfilment, essentially.
Some of this goes out of the window after Jon tries, and fails, to pick up Barbara, a Don in his eyes if ever there was one. Barbara – played against type, to gum-chewing and hip-swivelling perfection, by Scarlett Johansson – has ideas of her own. Jon has potential, she sees, but he needs work. I’m guessing she sees him as a bit of a fixer-upper, plenty of potential for anyone willing to put in a bit of elbow work.
Don Jon is at its strongest when it focuses on the sheer awkwardness of what passes for intimacy in its emotionally circumscribed world. Jon communicates with his close circle of friends and family mainly through profanity and aggression. Some of these moments are actually quite funny, particularly the Sunday lunch scenes with his family, especially Tony Danza as his testosterone-charged (or perhaps challenged?) father. But all too often, Gordon-Levitt pulls back, instead reverting to a stylistic, abbreviated, wilfully repetitive shooting style. It is intended to replicate the jumble of context free imagery in Jon’s head, I suppose, but comes across as a little too forced.
Whatever the merits of this approach, Don Jon loses its edge about half-way through, after Jon meets the somewhat ethereal Esther (Julianne Moore) in night class. (Barbara’s work. She has Jon down as a fixer-upper, remember?) Esther possesses none of the hooks or signifiers with which Jon is used to quantifying his life, and seems to be holding back something about herself. At just about the same point, an unexpected complication introduces itself into his relationship with Barbara; Jon is forced to think a bit more carefully about his capacity to shape relationships that actually stand for anything at all.
The problem is that after this point, Don Jon stops being pure abrasive fun and starts to take itself a tad too conventionally. There is a serious point in the film concerning the commodification of normative life into ones and dons, about treating relationships as a means to an end rather than the end in itself. But the film resolves itself in clichéd fashion, with a not-terribly-subtle social class subtext which leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But it’s not at all bad, just in some ways as incomplete as the porn that Don Jon enjoys.
Don Jon (2013)
Written and Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Starring Jospeh Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza
90 minutes, English w. Hebrew subtitles.
