DVD Note:
Moves
21 January 2014
It seems wildly unnatural to be out of bed today. I got Kathleen her tea and toast before she went to work, but then I crept back under the blankets. The best way not to get sick is to stay in bed, right? I managed to read a few pages of Ruth Rendell before falling into a doze.
(I’ve just started A Demon in My View. Arthur Johnson is a creepy person. When Anthony Johnson, in the flat downstairs, finds out just how creepy Arthur is, what will befall? I am also soldiering through Bryan Cartledge’s history of Hungary, The Will to Survive. I don’t know when I last read a book printed in such small type. The accent, I can see, is on modern times; the reader arrives at the year 1825 less than a third of the way in. At least I know where to look when I need a refresher on the Principality of Transylvania.)
***
Yesterday, we had a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt festival. We watched Don Jon in the afternoon and 50/50 in the evening. (Kathleen had not seen either.) I’ve been disappointed that Don Jon was shut out of the Oscars, but then, when I wrote about the movie in September, I did warn that “some early audiences may find it dissatisfying.” Watching it with Kathleen heightened my sense that viewers might find it obnoxious or even repellent. It is a genuinely daring movie, all the more for not particularly looking like one.
Don Jon is front-loaded with a lot of rather mindless vulgarity — guys hanging out around a bar, talking trash about the babes they want to squeeze. Then there is the hero’s apologia for his Internet porn habit. This is very well done, but, also, as they say, it is what it is. The second act, which begins sooner than it might but perhaps not soon enough to redeem some unfavorable first impressions, is a very subtle comedy slinking under a very brassy surface — the surface being Scarlett Johansson’s channeling of Barbra Streisand. This comedy is resolved in a manner that is not comic. The third act involves a major mood swing that doubles as a slow-motion climax, if such a thing is possible, at the summation of which the movie quietly ends. You don’t really know what Don Jon is about until the last couple of minutes. On top of that, Mr Gordon-Levitt has written for himself a role that departs from the ones for which he is known in two abrasive ways: Jon Martello is a bit nasty around the edges, and he doesn’t seem to give a damn about anybody else. Don Jon, I have to concede, asks a lot from its audience.
But that it’s worth the trouble I’m even more certain than I was in September. Every review of Don Jon that I remember reading at the time pointed out that the film had borne the working title, Don Jon’s Addiction. The ultimate emendation was wise. Don Jon is not about porn addiction. It looks like it is, and the hero’s “consumption” of porn not only takes up a fair amount of screen time — not too much for me, but almost, and probably too much for most women — but it also brings the second-act comedy to its unfunny climax. But the point of this pastime is not the pursuit of orgasms. All along, Jon is telling us something else about the release that he finds in responding to sex online. He loses himself.
That’s the key, not to his sex life, but to his entire life. Don Jon’s life is fully scripted: it is a matter of moves. The persona that he has built up in his short life is already a carapace, because there is no room for hesitation in his world. Jon is on all the time — with his friends, with his family, at the gym, in the confessional or in his car (we don’t, interestingly, see him at work) — even when he is alone, keeping his apartment spic and span. His only release from this relentless role-playing is online, where he has created a space in which to be private even from himself.
The pace of the film, in its first two acts, emphasizes this. It is fast, and the camera work is sure — bada bing! There’s a lot of sarcastic banter that passes for humor, and the scenes involving confession and the Mass are frankly satirical. We are invited to laugh at this New Jersey world of more respectable, but less affluent, Sopranos, where the men take off their dress shirts before they sit down to eat in their “dago Ts” and proceed to yell at each other. Jon seems very happy in his milieu; he’s just a naughty little boy who likes to whack off a lot, and surely that’s nobody’s business but his own.
Into this life walks Barbara Sugarman — very much at Jon’s invitation. Barbara is a princess, who has to be treated just right at all times. She is also a source of inspiration: she more or less commands Jon to take a night-school course in order to get a college degree. She wows his parents. She’s great. But misgivings arise from an unlikely source: it turns out that Barbara doesn’t think that it’s at all sexy for men to do their own housework. This revelation is all that the discerning viewer needs to know in order to see that Jon and Barbara are not made for one another. When, much more predictably, Barbara erupts in outrage upon discovering that Jon has been watching porn even after they’ve been to bed together, Jon’s crew rallies to his defense: the broad must be crazy to take offense. Jon’s life goes back to normal, to his mother’s dismay. Or so it seems.
In fact, Jon has entered another world, thanks to Barbara’s pressing. This world looks very different, and the camera shoots it differently, too; it is not always clear (as it has been, earlier in Don Jon) just what the focus of a wide shot might be. There are no bright lights; everything is in shadow. This is a world without moves. It is centered on a college campus, where the basic idea is to learn things you don’t know, and it is embodied in a woman called Esther, played by Julianne Moore.
We first encounter Esther in a doorway, sobbing, as Jon, nonplussed, passes by. Next, we see her apologizing for the sobbing. As her apology goes on, we see that she is offending against one of the cardinal rules of Jon’s world by sharing too much information. Jon is astounded when he learns the extent of this information: Esther reveals that she noticed Jon watching porn on his phone. He is almost unhinged when Esther presents him with a DVD of “better porn than what you’ve been watching.” But he is also confused by something entirely unprecedented: Esther, a woman, wants to be his friend. This is wrong, in Jon’s world. But he doesn’t really dislike it.
It turns out that Esther has a good reason for acting a bit strange. She has suffered some terrible losses. But she also breathes a richer air than what’s provided by the ventilation system in Jon’s microcosm. Esther knows what love is.
And you realize with a slap that love does not exist in Jon’s daylight world. Are his parents in love? It’s hard to tell. But they’re the only ones about whom one might entertain the question. Jon’s friends don’t know about love, the girls he beds don’t know about love, Barbara Sugarman most certainly does not know about love, and, as for the priest in the confessional —
We’re so inured to hearing that love is a commitment that we overlook its liberating side. Love certainly requires that it be honored and not betrayed, but that is not a lot to ask — it is nothing, really — because love, as it grows, expands the possibilities of being. Barbara Sugarman is right to ask Jon why he watches porn when he has her. She is right to doubt that he really loves her. But she can’t teach him about love, because she doesn’t know anything about it herself. Esther, who has lost love to an accident, is not sure that she can ever love again, but she is happy to teach Jon what it might be like, and, at the end of Don Jon, he is happy to learn. He is almost the Joseph Gordon-Levitt we recognize.
***
It’s interesting, in retrospect, that Adam Lerner, Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character in 50/50, doesn’t drive, because cars are so unsafe. Adam is not entirely logical about this, because he depends on friends and family for rides to and from his house on the outskirts of Seattle; he doesn’t always take the bus. One senses that, had the actor taken part in the screenwriting, the inability to drive a car would have been given some more satisfactory explanation.
50/50 is about a young man who develops a rare sarcoma along his spine; the movie title announces his chances of survival. By and large, however, this is an upbeat romantic comedy, albeit one with occasional gloomy moments, usually showing Adam’s shaved head on a pillow, his eyes glistening in the twilight. Adam has a problem with love, but, unlike Don Jon, this problem is not rooted in ignorance. No, Adam is very familiar with love: his mother’s. His mother suffocates him with loving concern. So he goes out with narcissistic “hot” girls who let him down. We can hope that Adam’s ordeal teaches him to accept his mother’s way of loving him, but in fact we don’t see him with her after he is wheeled into surgery at the climax. We only see how relieved his mother is when she learns that the operation has been a success.
Diane — Adam’s mom (played beautifully by Anjelica Huston) — is not lacking in self-awareness; she even says, at one point, “I suffocate him because I love him.” There. She can’t help herself. We see enough of her to know that the love is real, that it is not a cloak for discontented scolding. She doesn’t want anything but what a normal mother wants: her child’s health, and, eventually, upon finding the right partner, marriage. But she has no idea, I think, that she herself is making it impossible for Adam to find the right girl on his own, because she is forever teaching him that love leads to suffocation, to unlimited expressions of worry.
(Adam finds the right girl because his cancer throws him right into her lap, and he gets to know her in an unromantic context. Ideally, that is how lovers would always meet, whilst doing something other than looking for love.)
Me, I’m like Diane by nature. Only with effort — and not very pleasant effort, either — can I eat my worries about my daughter. There is no reason to worry about her, except that what happens to Esther’s husband and son in Don Jon might happen to her. Cars are unsafe! That is the level of my worry. People get pushed in front of trains. They fall through lose gratings. Stuff happens. I like to know that such things aren’t happening to my daughter. But I have to keep that worry to myself. I have to remind myself: Dude, you’ve seen too many movies.
I’ve seen so many movies that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s flouting of cinematic convention, in the interest of showing us something of the greatest importance about life, makes Don Jon a fountain of joy.