This is a guest post by Necroboticon
On its surface, Sundance Film Festival favorite Don Jon looks like an indie romantic comedy in which a guy kicks a porn addiction in favor of true love. Upon closer inspection, however, the film presents an honest and introspective look into gender roles and the laws of attraction.
Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt—who also wrote and directed the film) is a New Jersey Bachelor who earns the name “Don Jon” because of his current success with the opposite sex (it’s a riff on Don Juan, a fictional Spanish ladies’ man. Read a book, son). Even though he’s bringing a different woman home every weekend, his real-life sexual encounters never quite stack up to his virtual ones. He rationalizes this predilection with a laundry list of problems that he has regarding actual sex with actual women—all of which are decidedly self-centered.
His nicely compartmentalized life (“my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, my porn”) is thrown up into the air when he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson) a smokin’ hot Jersey princess who will settle for nothing less than a man who has his shit together. What Jon finds in pornography, Barbara finds in sappy chick flicks, and she uses her blistering sexuality to mold Jon into the leading man of her life’s romantic comedy—a man who takes her to meet his parents and enrolls in night classes to find work more prestigious than tending bar.
During these night classes, Jon meets Esther (Julianne Moore) who, through a series of awkwardly funny encounters, helps Jon come to the conclusion that his perspective on relationships needs to become more about giving fulfillment rather than getting it.
For his first time behind the camera, Gordon-Levitt has put together a tightly composed film that provides an insightful perspective into what truly makes relationships tick. Scarlett Johansson digs deep into the hair-twirling, gum-popping hotness of a Jersey girl with an agenda, and the interaction between Jon and his parents (Glenne Headly and Tony Danza—he steals whatever scene he’s in) is priceless. Not only does it earn points for seriously capitalizing on “Good Vibrations” by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, Don Jon brings enough depth, complexity, and insight to transcend its romantic comedy boundaries and become a truly worthwhile film.