Although 2013 has given us some great surprises, it’s also given us some horrible disappointments. And I’m sorry to report that Don Jon falls quite comfortably into the latter category. The directorial debut from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the best actors working today, this film pretends to be a play on the classic love story, but comes off as being nothing more than the classic love story... but with way, way, WAY more sex. Like, wow. If you plan on seeing this movie, I don’t recommend surround sound and 3-D glasses-- A good 1/3rd of it is fucking. I’m no prude (far from it), but when gratuitous violence or sex is only there for fun and doesn’t serve the plot, I have a problem. Much in the way that special effects often distract from a movie, these aspects (let’s call them ‘special defects’) distract heavily from Don Jon. At the end of the day, this movie is no more dramatic or well-acted than the porn that’s interspersed throughout it.
Levitt, who is an incredibly likable actor, somehow makes himself unlikable here with a character reprehensible in every way-- He is a hypocritical, porn-addicted, churchgoing, wife-beater wearing, road-rage greasy-haired no-good foul-mouthed asshole. And that’s sugarcoating it. His claim to fame is his ability to bang a new girl every night (Levitt must be a fan of How I Met Your Mother). The world that he creates for Jon is interesting, I suppose-- but it’s also sickeningly unrealistic. His character is painfully one-dimensional, and for some reason Levitt doesn’t bother exploring him any further than a skin-deep portrayal of a casual, laid-back guy who also happens to be an incredible dick. An important thing about liking a movie is forming an attachment to the main character, and within the first five minutes of Don Jon, I wanted to punch this fucker in the face.
Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson, who is established from the get-go as the “perfect girl,” is an obnoxious and controlling harpy who basically neuters Jon and gets mad at him for looking at porn. Really? So now I am watching a movie about a relationship between two idiots, both of whom have an equal claim to being the stupidest person in the film. I didn’t care about a single line of dialogue they said to each other, and I CERTAINLY didn’t care where the story was going. Once Julianne Moore was thrown in, I was pretty much done. I think this movie was just an excuse for Levitt to grind on Scarlett Johansson.
And by the way-- Isn’t Julianne Moore, like... 20 years older than Levitt? I’m not saying that two people of different age groups can’t fall in love, but there should have at least been something in this movie that addressed that. He barely even brings it up. But much like the rest of the story, this plot point rests mostly on convenience and the audience’s willingness to buy into an increasingly pointless movie. I don’t know what the point of this thing was: At first I thought it was the story of Jon’s rehabilitation through Johansson’s character. But when I realized that her character was a sadistic bitch, I started wondering why I was even watching the thing in the first place. At the end of the movie, Jon has barely changed at all. He doesn’t watch porn, great. There’s a reason why guys don’t talk about stuff like this in real life: We don’t want to hear about it, and we certainly don’t want to watch a movie about it.
A lot of the camerawork is great, but it’s wasted with shots of people having sex almost constantly. I don’t recall seeing a movie in recent memory where the sex-to-time-passed ratio was so high. Sure, sex scenes are fine if they actually drive the plot forward, but why were there a pair of tits flashing across the screen while Levitt ate dinner? Maybe because it’s to show that the character is thinking about porn ALL THE TIME. But that makes me wonder about Levitt himself... sometimes this movie merely feels like a way for him to work out some weird sexual issues through filmmaking. I don’t know what the point of this movie was, really, but the more damning fact is that I don’t care either.
Final Score for Don Jon: 5/10 stars. Some of the acting was good, and I laughed at the dialogue on occasion, but really this is just an unremarkable and occasionally depraved movie that I am INCREDIBLY glad I didn’t see in a theater with my mom. That would have been soooo awkward. But honestly, I have the feeling that this movie only got good reviews because critics don’t want to discourage Levitt from filmmaking. And even though this thing was a massive dud, I agree. There are certainly good ideas here, and at least we know that he’s willing to push the boundaries of what’s considered “politically correct.” From an abstract standpoint, the movie is fine. But it is enormously lacking when it comes to substance.
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