★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...
(3/4)
Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt | Producer: Ram Bergman | Writer: Joseph-Gordon Levitt | Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Brie Larson, Rob Brown | Music: Nathan Johnson, Malcolm Kirby Jr. | Cinematography: Thomas Kloss | Editor: Lauren Zuckerman
In Japan grown adult men – thirty, forty, fifty years old or more – lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases. In the United States even college kids long for adoption, desperately seeking the step-something through whom they’ll finally get off. In England, munching crumpets or kebabs, young men close their eyes and think of fake taxis. Swedish males are so perturbed by the worldwide reputation of their women that they live vicariously through a mixture of pornography, horror films, and gambling sites instead.
Of course sex existed before the internet, good and bed sex, selfish and caring and otherwise sympathetic, rough sex, timorous sex, and there were no doubt some people who had no sex at all. Pornography existed too, whether visual or textual, furnishing depraved and sane minds alike. Accounting for people’s sexual proclivities has always been difficult, and relationships from time immemorial beset by issues of communication and trust. But what happens when the Sears catalogue and hand-me-down copy of Playboy is replaced by Pornhub and endless abundance of smut?
Don Jon occasionally promises to answer some of these questions, or else offer a narrower glimpse into the psyche of a heterosexual male addicted to online porn. At other times it hints at things which, depending on your perspective, may be darker still: keen loss and etched grief, romance as a mask for control. In the end though it’s probably better for staying just within its lane as a slick and assured, periodically spunky, decidedly offbeat romantic comedy.
Jon Martello (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who writes and directs in a well-poised full-feature debut) is a walking erection. Of the mundane list of things he likes, online pornography sits right on top. The mere sound of pornographic grunting and groaning is enough to get him, in his own words, as ‘hard as a fucking rock’, and then he likes to spend time with it, flicking through stills and videos until the right clip comes along. In fact although he’s a playboy himself with no shortage of conquests, he prefers porn to the real thing: it’s less demanding and can be viewed in gloriously explicit widescreen. On Sundays he attends confession and for his masturbatory misdeeds, recites his penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers in place of counting reps at the gym.
There is a nice scene late in Don Jon where the blank expression on Jon’s face through the latticed confessional, focused but vacant and just a touch forlorn, echoes the expression his face takes when viewing porn. By this point Jon has come to realise the limitations of conventional churchgoing and matchmaking. He has broken his code to be with Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a voluptuous but increasingly haughty woman with both the means and the pretences to exist above Jon in class: intercourse, normally over within a couple of hours, in this case takes Jon more than a month. In many ways Barbara is a good fit for Jon: she is beautiful, his Italian American parents adore her and his father in particular would gladly do more than that, and she encourages him to supplement his bar work with night classes. But he begins to chafe at her demands, irrelevantly because she breaks up with him first when she realises he is still watching copious amounts of porn. If only he understood his web browser’s ‘history’ function.
Without Barbara, Jon enters back into his old routine with gusto: he breaks his masturbation record, tallying eleven ejaculations in one day. It’s only a final fling though, because love also comes in spurts. At night school he’s been engaging with Esther (Julianne Moore), a roguish coquette. She’s much older than Jon, and when she’s not handing him vintage pornographic material, through glimpses we come to understand that she’s still grieving the decades-old deaths of her husband and son. Esther teaches Jon that any worthwhile human interaction requires a bit of empathy, and sensitivity, an organic and tactile exploration borne of genuine interest.
Stylistically Don Jon has drawn a few comparisons with Saturday Night Fever, another working class bachelor’s restless and sometimes seedy coming-of-age. Thematically it inhabits some of the same spaces – concerning sex addiction, and the enticements and limitations of interfacing in a virtual world – as the contemporary films Shame and Her. But Don Jon happily stands on its own. It’s funny and manages to stay surprising within the broad outlines of the genre, and boasts three stellar performances from its exceptional leads, Levitt, Johansson, and Moore transcending roles that could easily have become types with some full-bodied, intuitive work. Glenne Headly and Tony Danza as Jon’s parents provide plenty of levity.
