One-sentence review: Don Jon instantiates the well-established truth that, in order to sustain meaningful contact with another human being in public, you must leave New Jersey and cross over into Manhattan, if only for the day.

Don Jon is too fresh to be manhandled by the likes of me, so I’ll just scatter a few notes. I expected something really good from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a young man whose quirky boyishness has never concealed a very sharp mind, but I wasn’t expecting anything as original as Don Jon. The trajectory of the plot stands in relation to Hollywood-normal as HAL does to IBM, and some early audiences may find it dissatisfying. But Gordon-Levitt knows what he’s doing, and Don Jon is a movie that everyone is going to learn to love, even at the cost of finding out that Scarlett Johansson’s adorably Streisandesque Barbara Sugarman isn’t — but stay, hush. Don Jon doesn’t go where it leads you to think it’s going to go, because it has even better ideas. And beneath the Jersey sprawl beats an elegant heart.

There ought to be an Academy Award for great casting. Glenne Headley and Tony Danza, demonstrating that they have been severely underrated by the Industry, bring you immediately into the bosom of their characters’ family and manage to persuade you that you might, under different circumstances, like  to be part of it. (Just as you knew you didn’t ever want to have dinner with the parents in Silver Linings Playbook.) Julianne Moore finds yet a another new way in which to be unsettling, but this time it’s the hero that she disturbs, not the audience. She goes from looking like someone who doesn’t belong in Jon’s world to being someone who will change it forever. It must be acknowledged that she has a lot of help from her costar.

It’s hard to say where Gordon-Levitt the screenwriter leaves off and Gordon-Levitt the actor picks up, but they collaborate so well that they seem to be one person, never moreso than when Jon is meant to be seen in unflattering light. There are some extraordinarily good running jokes. I will allude only to the one (one-and-a-half?) that involves confession and penance. The confession bit is slightly confused, as, in the movie, this sacrament seems to follow the sacrament that it is designed to precede. But perhaps this is part of the joke, an ostensible concession that the writer doesn’t really understand how these holy things work. (PS: He does.) Now. And in the hour. Of our death. I forget whether or not Jon throws in a groaned Amen; I lost count of the reps.

But there is also a sublimely funny scene, not involving jokes of any kind, that lingers as an afterburn. Washing his dishes and Windexing his mirrors, Joe Martello reminds us that good housekeeping is an important part of military life. Who would imagine that any woman in this day and age would regard his being conscientious about squeaky-clean kitchen floors as a turn-off?

Even more sublime — unless it’s incompetent, which I doubt — is the drama-in-reverse that connects Jon’s manner behind the wheel of his car (where we catch him, it seems, always on his way to Mass) and the reason that Esther lives alone in her house.

We can talk about this more fully later, when the movie comes out on DVD.

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Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, September 27th, 2013 at 3:19 pm.