Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a man of almost militaristic routine. His day consists of cleaning his apartment, working out, going to church, having dinner at his parent's house, grinding on girls at the club with his buddies and getting the hottest one to come home with him. Oh, and rubbing one out to porn straight after. Rinse and repeat. That all changes upon meeting Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), however, whose refusal to fuck a dude she met an hour and a half ago is grounds for falling in love. Eventually, she catches him doing the five knuckle shuffle and loses her mind, unable to fathom the very idea that someone could buy into such fantasy, in spite of her very similar notions regarding romantic movies. Jon tries to honour her wishes, but as he finds his life changing more and more to meet her expectations, he slips back into old habits. Along the way, he meets Esther (Julianne Moore), a free-spirited mature woman with secrets who teaches him shit he should have known all along. Eventually, it ends. ... Yep, that's the movie.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that a lot of people watch porn. Some more than others, sure, but it's definitely not a niche market. So it kind of makes Don Jon a little hard to swallow (pun always intended) when it presents this aspect of Jon's life as something that's particularly damaging to his well-being. Granted, he watches it at a comically-high rate but all that really means is he'd be coughing dust most of the time. However, if we buy that its genuinely a debilitating problem, what's its rationale? Jon fails to get the same level of satisfaction from sex that he does from porn. He's bought into the fantasy of it; he thinks porn is real. Yeah, fair enough, but I still just don't buy his "addiction" as something this bad. It becomes even more apparent when examined alongside the other aspects of his personality. Trust me, he's got worse things going for him than spending a lot of time on Pornhub. The aforementioned daily routine is played for humour initially in the film, but over time it serves to highlight just how empty this guy's existence is. There's no room for error or lack of adherence to his schedule. For instance, he goes to church, confesses to multiple accounts of sex out of wedlock and masturbation, and receives his daily quota of "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys". The very next scene is him lifting weights and reciting a line with each exhalation. Every. Single. Time. Heaven forbid he ever rear ended someone. He'd probably just kill himself out of inconvenience. Initially, like Jersey Shore, it's funny. But then you're seeing the same process repeated a fifth time and it starts to become pathetic.
On top of that, by movie's end he doesn't even go through the typical transformation into a good person. He just realises how much of a colossal fuckhead he was being and changes into the regular fuckhead most normal people are. Returning to the aforementioned confessional scenes, at one point Jon heads in and proudly declares he's had sex out of wedlock a bunch, but he hasn't watched porn at all. He gets a lesser sentencing, and does a little fist pump, successfully haggling out some easy absolution. Later still, he heads in to say he hasn't watched porn and he's had sex once, but this time it was different. It was real. "10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys," the priest says. Jon is staggered, because in his mind he's on par with Jesus Christ here, but in reality, a reality he still doesn't quite comprehend by film's end, he's just a normal human being. At the very least, he rises above most of the people he associates with. There's a scene towards the end of the film where he meets up with Barbara, post-implosion of their relationship. She's ready for him to come pleading on his knees for another shot at her beauteous perfection, and is given quite the rude shock when all he wants to do is say sorry. Sorry it didn't work out, sorry he appreciated porn more than her and sorry that it took him so long to realise he had a problem. She wasn't prepared for this, but far be it from her to acknowledge any sort of mutual wrong-doing. Instead, she has to belittle him once again, and tell him that his idolisation of the perfect woman is false and if he doesn't change that he's going to die alone. And even if he does, he sure as hell isn't getting back with the closest thing the world has to a perfect woman. Jon smiles, comfortable with the internal knowledge that he's the better bad person, and says, "I'm sorry."
It might sound like I didn't dig Don Jon. Ultimately, I did. It's well-written, Joseph Gordon-Levitt boasts incredibly competent directing abilities for his debut, possessing deft comic timing and editing, and the acting is really fucking good, from Scarlett Johansson especially. But I doubt I'd watch it again. For all of its wit and underlying sentiment, these are just boring people whose problems are clear as day, and you spend the entire film hoping tooth and nail that they realise them. Really the only times I became genuinely interested in the film were the dinner table scenes between Jon and his family. You see, in this den, Jon immediately becomes the lesser to Jon Sr., his father, played unbelievably well by the fucking boss, Tony Danza. You begin to understand the construction of his personality a lot more, for better and worse. It almost makes him, dare I say it, sympathetic. And for all of my harping about watching a lot of porn not being a bad thing, especially compared to the rest of his life, I've got a sneaky feeling that's Don Jon's point. It's muddled, and often self-contradictory, but so is reality. And in reality, a guy like Jon isn't going to magically become a cool guy overnight. It takes baby steps, and Don Jon is content in just showing you the first couple. And at the end of the day, I got to look at Scarlett Johansson's bits. What the fuck am I complaining about?
