thoughts on Don Jon (spoilers)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Jon, a young Jersey man who watches a lot of online porn.  He goes to confession every week, and it seems that he sometimes watches it as much as three or four times a day.  He doesn't actually think there's anything wrong with this, but he knows that he's committing a sin, so he confesses it anyway.  Outside of watching porn, he goes out to clubs with his friends a lot and has a lot of one-night stands, but no serious relationships until he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson).  It seems that she is perfect...but he's still watching a ton of porn. 

Naturally, she has a major problem with this when she finds out, but that's not the only thing she won't accept as-is about him.  He's a bartender, and she insists that he take a night class even though he never would have had any interest in one on his own; in theory, suggesting that someone get an education isn't a bad thing, but she basically just wants a boyfriend (and eventually husband) who makes a lot of money, and she thinks a degree is the way to that. 

There's also a scene that I found fairly bizarre where they're in a store looking at curtain rods or some such, and he tells her that he also wants to pick up some Swiffer pads while they're there.  She doesn't even know what those are (a housekeeper does her cleaning), and she can't believe that Jon, a grown man, does his own cleaning.  She finds it downright offensive, if not disturbing, when she offers to send her housekeeper over and he says that he enjoys cleaning; he's proud of his apartment, and he likes keeping it nice.  She tells him that when they're living together, he won't be doing that anymore.  She won't even let him go buy the Swiffer pads, because she says it's embarrassing.  Like I said, bizarre.  She knows he doesn't make a lot of money.  Who does she think cleans his place?  Would she rather he lived in a pigsty?  So...it's not just that she wants to change him, but she's fairly out of touch with reality, to a degree that I was fairly taken aback by.  It's a pretty brilliant scene; I can't remember ever seeing a discussion about cleaning products on film before, and it reveals so much about both of them.

Anyway, so she dumps him because of the porn.  You think that the film's happy ending is going to be that he learns to give it up and she takes him back, but the film takes an interesting turn involving a fellow night class student named Esther (Julianne Moore) who initially doesn't seem all that important (to Jon or to the movie).  She finds out about the porn one of the first times she and Jon meet (he takes to watching it on his phone to hide it from  Barbara); she's not judgmental about it, but she eventually helps him understand what he's missing out on with real women, and from real sex, by being so fixated on porn.  I still, for a time, thought that Esther was just going to be the person who helped Jon give up porn so Barbara would take him back.  But maybe Barbara was never right for him.

I think the amount of time I've spent talking about the plot here shows how interested I was in it.  At times, the focus on porn is a little, for lack of a better word, skeevy...but I was genuinely interested in Jon and wanted to find out what happened to him.  For that matter, all of the characters are interesting, even those with less screen time, such as Jon's family and two best friends.  The film sees the humor in the Jersey world it is set in without making fun of it, the performances are all solid, and the plot has some unexpected turns.  I really liked this movie.