Don Jon is definitely a bold concept for Gordon-Levitt to tackle on his first film. The title character (Gordon-Levitt) is a New Jersey bartender with a love of going to church, his friends, his family, clubbing, sleeping with girls from the club and to top things off, porn. Jon is quite content with his routine until he decides to give monogamy a try after meeting the stunning Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) during one of his visits to the club. Everything is going fine until Barbara finds out about Jon's unholy addiction to porn. When Barbara starts to question the relationship over Jon's porn habits, Jon begins to evaluate himself and tries to kick his addiction with the help of an older woman (Julianne Moore) he meets at his community college night class.
Don Jon does a pretty good of handling delicate central material. A movie centered around porn could've been incredibly immature and crass, but Gordon-Levitt (who also wrote the screenplay) treats the topic with a sense of maturity and intelligence. Clearly with porn being such a key element in the plot there is going to be a lot of frank sex talk, but it never delves into the many frat-house level jokes that could've easily been inserted given the subject matter. Jon is an asshole who loves sex and porn, but he's a smart and relatively likeable guy as well thanks to the writing and acting from Gordon-Levitt. Gordon-Levitt also built around his personal strengths as an actor and filmmaker with a very talented cast that all work well together. Johansson makes a solid love interest with her good looks and the way her character challenges Jon to change his ways for better or worse while Moore is the deepest character here and matches her character's complexity with a nuanced and genuine performance. The film's most surprising casting choice, Tony Danza, is also responsible for what is the strongest performance in the film. This marks Danza's first major appearance in film or television in almost 10 years and Danza looks happy to be back with his energetic and amusing performance here. The casting of Danza in this role is a stroke of borderline genius on the filmmakers part.
For all that Don Jon gets right with its charm, smarts and laughs, the film also has its missteps. While Gordon-Levitt crafts a solid and original script here, there are some glaring problems with it that can't be overlooked. The film's third act comes off as really awkward with a jarring tonal shift that doesn't align with the rest of the movie. I get that it was trying to be insightful and show a change in Jon's character, but unlike a majority of the film which was authentic and smart, this portion felt forced and almost entirely unbelievable. When the credits rolled, I was left in a state of confusion over the ending to the film. For a film that felt so real for the first hour, it ending on such a sour, fabricated and abrupt note that it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that took away a decent amount from the overall quality of the movie. I expected it to be funnier and more consistently heartfelt, but Don Jon is still a sweet and realistic film with a good cast that shows that Joseph Gordon-Levitt can more than hold his own as a writer and director.
3.5/5 Stars
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