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| Tony Danza and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in their father-and-son wife beaters. |
By Dan Hagen
“Pillow Talk” was the romantic comedy perfectly suited to
its year, 1959, which means it’s extremely dated now. But the romantic comedy
“Don Jon,” as 2013 as a text message, is just as funny as the Doris Day vehicle
ever was, and has a bit more heart.
Instead of a smartly dressed Manhattanite on a party line,
we get a lower-class bartender on porn. The veneer of sophistication is
replaced by a veneer of crudity because, as you may have noticed, our times are
crude. But there’s humor beneath the vulgarity, and humanity beneath the humor.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote, directed and starred, and every
smart trick he learned in a Hollywood childhood is up there on the screen. He
knows that one secret to a great screen joke is to startle the audience with its
truth.
He plays a self-contained young man whose self-imposed
limitations power his self-satisfied Jimmy Cagney strut. He has just eight
interests, no more — his body (muscled), his car (muscle), his buddies (beer),
his family (Italian-American), his church (Catholic), his girls (many) and his
apartment (clean, thanks to his quirky Felix Unger fervor). And, of course, his
on-line pornography (addictive).
Secretly, he prefers the perfection of porn to the girls he
beds, until someone even more perfect crosses his path and upsets his balance.
Falling fast and hard for a woman who looks like Scarlett Johannson (because
she is) and sounds like Fran Drescher, he learns that perfection comes with its
own set of demands.
Gordon-Levitt, meanwhile, knows how to make perfect use of
the elements at his disposal, which include Johannson, Glenne Headley, Tony
Danza, Julianne Moore and the satiric possibilities of ritual. He swiftly and
hilariously skewers the ritualized silliness of dance club pickups, of the way
guys yell in cars and even (play within a play) of romantic comedy films (Anne
Hathaway and Channing Tatum pitch in with cameos there). This is the best kind
of comedy, the kind that hits so close to home that the audience is sometimes
momentarily too startled to laugh.
Finally, Gordon-Levitt’s character will need to exceed his
limitations, and to do that he’ll have to heed the voice of wisdom, which comes
from an unexpected quarter.
This movie is a daybreaker (so good it breaks your day cleanly
into halves, before and after). It’s the best film I’ve seen in the last 10
months.
