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In Don Jon, his debut feature as writer-director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ponders one of the oldest questions in movies: How do you convey habitual action on film? Moving images are naturally suited for the present tense, though soon after their invention filmmakers developed ways to speak in past tense: flashbacks, or superimpositions that visualize a character’s memories. Alain Resnais innovated a “future conditional” tense for movies in such works as La Guerre est Finie (1966), illustrating what might happen based on characters’ speculations. Habitual action is harder to illustrate, since images (moving and otherwise) have a way of proclaiming their individuality. Even if a narrator tells us, “Every Sunday I go to church,” the accompanying image only shows us what he does on this particular Sunday.
I’m glad I didn’t review Don Jon. I still haven’t disentangled its virtues from its egregious shortcomings, such as the grating Italian-American stereotypes or Gordon-Levitt’s tendency to critique romantic-comedy cliches with countercliches. But I admire the film’s relatable musings about how the Internet might be changing life for the worse, a subject that most movies (outside of moralizing, one-note art films like Afterschool or Disconnect) are too embarrassed to broach.
