Guidos and Guidettes in Love

Rating: 7/10 (29 October 2013)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has turned into one of the best and most interesting of Hollywood's young talents. He has a knack for picking good projects, and consistently takes on interesting roles, not content to glide by on his looks and charm like so many pretty boy actors.
So it did not surprise me that "Don Jon," his debut as director (he also wrote and stars), is not a typical romantic comedy. Though billed as a movie about a sex addict, the film isn't about addiction so much as it's about the inability of people to form meaningful relationships with others because of preconceived notions (most of them completely unrealistic) about what those relationships should be. One would think based on previews that Gordon-Levitt's character, a guido with slicked back hair and an Internet porn obsession, meets his match when he falls for a hot dame (played by Scarlett Johansson) and must become a better man in order to earn the right to be loved by her. But that's not what happens, and one of the things I liked best about the movie is that Johansson proves to be the film's villain (as much as a movie like this has a villain), and that her expectations about relationships are just as distorted as his, just in different ways.
"Don Jon" isn't a terrific movie. It feels more like an early draft than a fully fleshed out final product, with conflicts being resolved too quickly and patly, characters coming to realizations too easily. It was too hard for me to lose myself in the movie and forget that I was watching actors play parts, a sure sign for me that something about the film I'm watching isn't totally working. I felt this the most when watching the scenes between Gordon-Levitt and Julianne Moore, who plays an older and wiser woman who becomes Don's mentor in sex and love. Moore is a lovely actress and I always want to like her, but something about her character in this just didn't ring true for me, though a revelation about her character late in the movie gives it one of its nicest and most touching moments.
So not a great film, but certainly one worth checking out as a rental, and good enough to make me look forward to what Joseph Gordon-Levitt the filmmaker is going to do next.
The film also stars Tony Danza as Don's foul-mouthed father, and Alison Brie as his sister, who has exactly one line of dialogue but somehow manages to be one of the most memorable things about the movie.
Grade: B