Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote, directed and stars in Don Jon, a 2013 romantic comedy-drama about a New Jersey bartender whose porn habit has wrecked his sense of what sex and love are supposed to feel like. It runs 90 minutes. It premiered at Sundance on January 18, 2013, and Relativity Media put it in U.S. theaters on September 27. It cost $5 million and grossed $41 million worldwide.
That is a good return on a first feature. The film itself is a thinner thing than its reputation suggests.
Trailer, via TIFF.
A bartender, a Chevelle, and a daily habit
Gordon-Levitt plays Jon Martello, Jr., a young Italian-American who lives alone, works out, keeps his apartment spotless, drives a 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle SS, goes to church with his family, and sleeps with a lot of women. He also masturbates to hardcore pornography every day. His own verdict on the two activities is the movie’s premise: he claims to enjoy sex, and he finds it inferior to porn.
That inversion is the whole engine. Jon’s life is not in crisis. He has friends, a car he loves, a family that feeds him, and a priest he confesses to. What he does not have is any idea why the real thing keeps coming up short.
The tagline is “Everyone loves a happy ending.” The film means that as a joke and then spends 90 minutes taking it seriously.
Barbara wants a serious relationship
At a nightclub with his friends, Jon meets Barbara Sugarman, played by Scarlett Johansson. She comes from money. She turns down his offer of a one-night stand. He finds her on Facebook, asks her out, and she sets the terms: a serious relationship, no sex for more than a month.
She pushes him to enroll in an evening community college class so he can get a career outside the service industry. She introduces him to romance films, which he dismisses as fantasy. Their families meet. Jon’s parents, played by Tony Danza and Glenne Headly, are immediately smitten and start hoping for a wedding.
When Jon and Barbara finally sleep together, he is still dissatisfied. She catches him watching porn and is disgusted. He talks his way out of it by claiming a friend sent it as a joke email. She spends more time at his apartment. He starts watching on his cell phone.
The film is careful with Barbara. She is not a villain and she is not a prize. She is a woman with a fixed script for how this is supposed to go, and the script has no room for the person actually standing in front of her.
Esther sees the phone
In class, Jon notices his middle-aged classmate Esther crying alone. Julianne Moore plays her. When she sits down next to him to explain, she sees the porn on his phone. Later she shocks him by showing him an erotic video of her own.
Moore’s scenes are the best in the film and the shortest. Esther is the only character who treats Jon’s problem as a fact about him rather than an insult to her. She does not lecture. She does not seduce him into a lesson. She just refuses to pretend.
The supporting cast is deep for a $5 million movie: Rob Brown as Bobby, Brie Larson as Jon’s sister Monica, Glenne Headly and Tony Danza as his parents, Lindsey Broad as Lauren, Jeremy Luke as Danny, Paul Ben-Victor as the priest, Italia Ricci as Gina, Amanda Perez as Lisa.
Brie Larson has almost no lines as Monica. She spends most of the film at the dinner table, watching. It is a smart piece of casting — the one person in the family who sees the whole pattern and never gets to say so.
The loop the film cannot leave
Don Jon has a structure it returns to again and again: Jon at the gym, Jon cleaning, Jon at church, Jon at the club, Jon at the computer. Same shots, same rhythms, same confession. Some viewers read that as laziness. It is not. The repetition is the argument. Jon is not spiraling. He is standing still, and the film makes you feel the standing still.
The problem is that the movie never quite escapes the loop it built. Once Esther arrives, the film has somewhere to go, and it gets there quickly. The last act is shorter and softer than the setup deserves. The ending is not false, but it is tidy in a way the first hour kept promising it would not be.
Gordon-Levitt the director is better here than Gordon-Levitt the writer. The film looks confident. It moves. The editing has a pulse. But the script keeps explaining Jon to us in voiceover when the images were already doing the work.
The numbers
- Title: Don Jon (2013)
- Director and writer: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- Runtime: 90 minutes
- Genres: Romance, Comedy, Drama
- Premiere: Sundance Film Festival, January 18, 2013
- U.S. release: September 27, 2013, by Relativity Media
- Budget: $5 million
- Worldwide gross: $41 million
- Score: 6.6 of 10
Don Jon is a real movie with a real subject, made by someone who had something to say and said it in 90 minutes for $5 million. That is worth more than most studio comedies manage. It is also less than the sum of its parts: a sharp first hour, a rushed finish, and a lead performance that is more controlled than it is revealing.
The film’s best idea is that Jon’s problem is not porn. It is that he never learned to want a person instead of a routine. Barbara cannot fix that. Esther does not try to. The movie knows this and says it plainly, which is why the tidy ending sits a little wrong.
What stays with you is not the confession booth or the bedroom. It is Brie Larson at that dinner table, silent, watching her brother run the same play over and over. The film never gives her a line about it. That silence is the sharpest thing in it.
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