I gave my ticket to the movie theater employee expecting him to quickly rip off the stub and send me on my way to the theater showing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s screenwriting and directorial debut, Don Jon. But the ticket collector didn’t let me through. He instead asked, “ID?” It took me a second to realize he doubted I was 17. A senior at Princeton University, I was offended I didn’t look mature enough to watch a rated R film.
Five minutes into the movie, I realized that the theater employee might have been right. Maybe, I wasn’t ready for this film. In the first ten minutes, Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) goes to a club, brings home a stranger, has sex with her, waits until she falls asleep, and immediately begins masturbating to online pornography. (Be warned, montages of real porn appear excessively throughout the film. It’s vulgar, but we don’t see anything too explicit.)
Oh great, I thought, I chose this movie for a class, and I’m going to write a review on it that might get published online. Future employees who Google my name will find it alongside the words “pornography,” “sex,” and “masturbation.” The next thing running through my head was, what would I even write about? What could I, an Ivy League-educated, Southern Californian, shy goodie two shoes relate to in a story about a fast-talking, uneducated, New Jersey bartender addicted to porn?
It turns out a lot.
The film’s basic story is a tale of boy meets girl. Jon, a guy who can get any woman he wants any time he wants and who watches porn 15-30+ times a week (we know because he confesses each week at church), falls in love with Barbara (Scarlett Johansson). Barbara, a “dime” who demands her man sweep her off her feet in the manner of a Nicholas Sparks rom-com hero, throws Jon off his routine. Barbara doesn’t do random hookups and has high standards. Her ideal man finds porn disgusting, works in an office, and doesn’t know what Swiffer is because real men don’t do housework. “It’s not sexy,” she says. Basically, boyfriend material is everything Jon is currently not, and Jon must work hard to satisfy “the most beautiful thing” he’s ever seen in his life.
Gordon-Levitt makes Jon relatable even to those who aren’t porn fanatics. Jon’s addiction is less a personal idiosyncrasy than it is a symptom of the cultural disease plaguing our time: media-obsession. Even the film’s princess, Barbara, suffers from it. She eats up Hollywood romance and can’t seem to separate reality from fantasy, comparing eligible bachelors to swoon-worthy Channing Tatum characters. Of course, the men she meets in real life can’t measure up. Jon and Barbara remind us that we are so bombarded with images of sex and romance fabricated for the screen that we’ve lost sight of how relationships in real life should be.
Though smartly written, Don Jon at times is hard to watch. The camera unnecessarily shakes, pans, and zooms, and the scenes are repetitive. Much of the film is a sequence of the same shots and sounds (every time Jon watches porn, we see the same shot of a laptop and hear the same sound of a Macbook starting up). Though at first effective, the repetition grows old. The one and a half hour long film begins to drag three quarters of the way through.
Yet despite its noticeable flaws, Don Jon has great moments that make the film worth watching. The actors grease their hair, put on a full face of makeup, have perfect bodies, and talk with exaggerated Jersey accents. They give the film an over-the-top, exaggerated feel that denies a passive viewing experience. By slyly taking the romantic comedy and satirizing it, Gordon-Levitt forces his audience to rethink what love is in a culture where imitations are often made to look better than the real thing.
Grade: B+
Kristi Yeung is a senior in the English Department.