"Don Jon"

On paper, “Don Jon” had everything going for it: a fertile subject matter – pornography addiction and how gender stereotypes perpetuated by mass entertainment affect heterosexual relationships, a gifted and intelligent actor in both the lead role and the director’s chair and a supporting cast that includes Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore. The major concern would be the fact that this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s first feature-length film, but even then one might be confident that he would have learned a lot from having worked with such luminaries as Christopher Nolan and Gregg Araki.  What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything as it turned out. Rarely have I seen a film with so much potential crash and burn so spectacularly and never recover. From the first voice-over that reveals Gordon-Levitt’s hammy Italian-American New Jersey accent to a predictable happy ending, “Don Jon” betrays its own purpose by wallowing in ethnic and gender stereotypes and using a PSA character arc as a substitute for a journey of genuine self-exploration.

The most immediately obvious flaw that torpedoes the film’s credibility is the way its characters are written and acted. Take Jon’s family of working-class Italian-Americans: While the mother makes pasta and pesters her son about getting a nice woman, he and his father sit at the table in front of an American football game wearing tank tops and turning every little thing into a loud thick-accented argument. All that’s missing is a black-clad grandmother clutching a rosary while speaking nothing but Italian. It’s like watching a cartoon parody of a Martin Scorsese film.

 

In fact, the entire film resembles little more than a substandard attempt at doing a Martin Scorsese exploration of toxic ultra-masculinity. This is especially obvious in the recurring scenes in which Jon goes to church with his family as part of his daily routine – always the same shots of the same church parts with the same camera angles framed the same way, just in case the audience might have missed its ritual nature – and, as a formality, confesses his sins of lust to his priest who repeats the same instructions of contrition. These scenes – particularly the close-up shots detailing religious iconography – are blatantly aped from Scorsese’s own feature-length debut “Who’s That Knocking At My Door”. But whereas Scorsese used such shots to express the conflict between his protagonist’s feelings and the morality he was brought up in, Gordon-Levitt merely uses them as a tautological joke whose final punchline – the priest doesn’t care about Jon’s sins any more than Jon himself did, thus the promises of comfort offered by religion are as fake as those offered by Hollywood and porn – is a foregone conclusion.

The rest of the characters fare little better. Scarlett Johansson, who has proven in films such as “Under The Skin”, “Her”, “Lost In Translation” and even Woody Allen’s overrated bore “Match Point” to be a versatile and charismatic actress, would normally prove ideal as Barbara, Jon’s idealized object of desire. Indeed, her full lips, voluptuous figure and blonde hair can sometimes make her appear as strangely unreal as some of the porn stars Jon watches, yet the humanity she brings in her best performances is indisputably real. Unfortunately, her character amounts to little else than a shallow dumb blonde caricature, not helped by Johansson’s distractingly exaggerated New Jersey accent. Her love of romantic comedies offered great potential in exploring the false expectations they incite in relationships, but it is only slightly touched upon and never truly examined, let alone deconstructed the way John Cassavetes did in his masterful “Minnie And Moskowitz”. Much like his character, Gordon-Levitt never manages to see past Barbara as a stereotype. The only difference is that Jon’s stereotypes revolve around her looks, whereas Gordon-Levitt’s revolve around the personality she displays.

As an older student in Jon’s course recovering from a personal tragedy and tasked by the plot with showing him what really meaningful sex is like, Julianne Moore is given a similarly stereotypical character, one whose sole purpose is to help Jon become a better person and hook up with him at the end. However, she is also the only actress in the entire main cast who succeeds in acting like a believable human being, so credit where credit is due. With her pale face and her world-weary, self-deprecating smile and eyes, Moore has mastered the art of portraying complicated women still smarting from the pain they have gone through, but enduring nevertheless.

 

It is greatly disappointing to see an actor as sensitive as Joseph Gordon-Levitt give a bad performance, even moreso when it is in a film in which he appears to have put a lot of effort and thought. His performance is a never-ending series of affectations that clog up his character like an overstuffed toilet; all struts, squints, sneers and smirks in a thick, over-the-top accent. It’s impossible to take Jon seriously as a human being when he acts like a young Steven Seagal trying to do an impression of Robert De Niro. Perhaps Gordon-Levitt intended this as a manifestation of Jon’s constant need to prove his masculinity, but it just ends up being another example of the film’s heavy-handedness, and the caricature ends up devouring the character.

 The subject of sexually dysfunctional masculinity is too often treated as a joke for bad films such as “Don Jon” to be allowed to pretend to shed any real light on it. Viewers in search of a more authentic work on the matter should turn to independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and his devastating autobiographical docu-dramedy “I Am A Sex Addict”. Not only did Zahedi dare to examine his personal demons and expose them with brutal unflinching honesty, he used comedy in a way that enhanced the experience rather than soften it, and in doing so earned his happy ending both in the film and in real life.

"Boyhood"

"I thought there’d be more to it than that" says mother Patricia Arquette towards the end of the film as the son she has watched grow up through financial troubles and a series of abusive relationships, finally leaves the nest to start a new life at college. Her line echoes the general feeling that lingers after experiencing “Boyhood”. Richard Linklater’s film gained much attention for its scope and ambition: capturing 12 years of a boy’s life from childhood to adulthood using the same actors, enabling them – and Linklater himself – to grow along with their characters. The idea is for the viewers to witness that growth, and through it experience the miracle that is everyday life.

The first objective is an inarguable success. Through its 165 minutes of runtime, we experience protagonist Mason’s evolution from a curious 6 year-old to a confused 18 year-old still looking for a “right way” to live his life. This evolution takes place over a series of episodes, centered at first around his single mother’s college studies and relationships,  in which Mason is more witness than actor,  then gradually over his own personal life experiences: Going out drinking with older boys, making up stories about his sexual experience when he finds his masculinity challenged, himself challenging his second stepfather’s traditional notions of masculinity by wearing nail varnish, getting invited to a girl’s party by another girl who says her friend likes him… In-between these scenes, he and his sister visit or are visited by their fun-loving middle-class liberal father (Ethan Hawke), who makes a point of treating his kids as equals and making his relationship with them as honest and open as can be.

While many of these scenes such as the aforementioned one create the expectance of a follow-up within the viewer’s mind, most of them are self-contained and devoid of narrative consequences. Linklater is not interested in a narrative journey but in seizing what Rob Thomas would call the “little wonders” that make life remarkable, which is where the film falls short in many ways.

Setting aside the natural thematic restrictions that come with using the life of a white middle-class American boy to represent what it means to grow up, the film’s episodic nature requires a certain capacity from its filmmaker to turn mundane situations into revelatory events and thus use his character as a mirror to show ourselves in a fresh new light. Regrettably, it is not until Mason reaches adolescence that this occurs in a regular and satisfactory manner. For much of Mason’s childhood, we see things happening – he and a friend marveling at the existence of breasts in a lingerie catalogue; his sister protesting when their mother announces their plans to move – but with little insight into the characters’ behaviour and actions. Things just happen, and we move on to the next scene. The most compelling aspect of this part of the film comes from the adults more than the children, particularly the mother’s new husband (Marco Perella), a seemingly-friendly college professor whose abusive nature is revealed progressively and insidiously: Casual remarks directed toward his son during dinner at a restaurant or at a golf course, passive-aggressive chastising of his wife’s children for not completing their tasks on time and of his wife for not supporting him enough… These scenes act like layers being peeled off to culminate in the revelation of his terrifying true nature, as the children come home one morning to find their mother crying on the floor as her husband explains that she “had an accident”. The most frightening thing about Marco Perella’s performance is how ordinary it is: He doesn’t try to otherize his character by making him a Jack Torrance-like monster. Linklater’s on-the-surface approach proves most effective here, as Perella can only rely on himself to make his character feel like a human being rather than just a shallow representation of domestic violence. His alcoholic stepdad is cruel and selfish, but there is something almost childlike behind his eyes, some sort of desperate need to prove control and manhood.

Once the film dives into Mason’s teenage years, it gains in astuteness and sensibility, and it is not hard to draw parallels between Mason’s growth as a human being and Linklater’s own growth as a filmmaker. He films his star, a naturally fascinating Ellar Coltrane, with more attention to how he reacts to other people and situations. With little need for dialogue – though conversations also gain in depth – Linklater successfully condenses and conveys the moods and tonal shifts Mason goes through in every scene, whether it’s getting a hunting rifle and a bible from his father’s new girlfriend’s parents for his birthday or seeing his father embarrass his sister by urging her to wear condoms with her boyfriend so as not to become a parent before she’s ready to do so like her parents did. The scenes are filmed and scripted with the tried-and-true know-how of a mainstream Hollywood veteran, yet they never feel as flat as some of the earlier scenes did, nor do they smack of artificiality.

“Boyhood” does not possess the same bittersweet acuity as François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga did – save for the execrable clip-show finale “Love On The Run” – nor does it isolate special fragments of life with the simple grace demonstrated by Terrence Malick in “The Tree Of Life” and “To The Wonder”. But what it occasionally lacks in profundity, it makes up for in heart. It manages to go beyond the novelty of its concept to indirectly illustrate a filmmaker’s developing maturity as both an artist and a person. You may not come out of it having learned a great deal about life than you already knew, but you will come out having gotten to know an interesting person you may find yourself hoping to meet again someday, in another film.

"The Reader"

“The Reader” is a frequently moving film whose thought-provoking subject is severely damaged by director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare’s wrongheaded approach to it. It begins as a coming-of-age romance between a teenage boy and an older woman hiding dark secrets and persists in remaining one to the end, common sense be hanged.

The film’s entire premise – that of a teenager just below most nations’ ages of consent having an affair with a woman whom he later discovers to have been a war criminal – is morally ambiguous and thus requires caution on the filmmakers’ part in order to explore it intelligently. To Daldry and Hare’s credit, the effort is most certainly present, particularly in the penultimate scene in which the grown-up protagonist (Ralph Fiennes) meets a survivor’s daughter (Lena Olin), leading to a conversation in which he both struggles to come to terms with his lover’s crimes while also trying to justify his feelings for her. The superb combination of Fiennes’s half-maintained composure with Lena Olin’s calm but firm indignation make it the film’s best scene, and a glimpse of how excellent the film could have been had Daldry’s sentimentality been balanced by a greater sense of moral perspective.

The part of the film dealing with the affair is filmed with such sensuality – expressed particularly well by Roger Deakins’ admirable-as-always lighting and framing – that one is almost tempted to overlook the fact that what is displayed is essentially statutory rape. A fact that Daldry does not appear entirely unaware of, as evidenced by the way he shoots Hanna (Kate Winslet) closing in on 15 year-old Michael (David Kross) with a towel: First from a semi-subjective low-angle shot that suggests Michael’s point of view from the bathtub, then by placing his camera right next to the towel and following Michael rising from the tub to wrap himself in the towel, as the following shot reveals Hanna naked from behind, holding the towel. This succession of images gives the viewer an impression of a hunter successfully ensnaring her prey. The following close shots of Michael’s nervous reactions to her kissing his back reinforce that idea, even as the rest of the film plays the romance angle quite straight. Wherein lies the major problem in the later revelation of Hanna’s past.

By the time he discovers the truth, Michael is a law student studying German guilt during World War II. He is taken on a trip to a trial of SS guards by his Holocaust-surviving professor (Bruno Ganz, surely a casting decision based on his daring portrayal of Adolf Hitler in “Downfall”), who spends the film serving as the voice of German conscience rather than a character in his own right. He discovers Hanna was one of those guards. As the judge repeatedly asks her why she knowingly sent so many Jews to die, she can only reply “Well, what would you have done?” It’s neither a display of defiance nor a rhetorical question. She is honestly confused; the idea of defying orders, of NOT letting Jews die, seems beyond her grasp. This would imply that Hanna may be a sociopath, yet Kate Winslet’s outstanding multilayered performance suggests something more complicated. Her past displays of bottled-up shame and mood swings point towards possible remorse, or at least an emotionally violent reaction to being reminded of the past. Add this to her quasi-childlike incomprehensive attitude at the trial, and Hanna looks less like an evil sociopath and more like someone so morally blinded that she may as well be have been living on another plane of existence altogether, until she was violently brought back to Earth. She is in fact so outside of the common moral sphere that she is more ashamed of her illiteracy – a twist most viewers will have easily guessed by now – than of causing so many innocent people to die.

Michael’s horrified realization that the woman he loved – or at least, in his teenage mind, thought he loved – was not only actively complicit in one of the worst crimes in human history but didn’t have any qualms about it, had the potential for great drama. And at first, it appears to be fulfilling that potential: After some hesitation, Michael decides to deliberately withhold knowledge of Hanna’s illiteracy so that she may be condemned to a full life sentence. Years pass, Michael gets married, has a daughter, then divorces, but Hanna remains on his mind. He is still torn between love, disgust and incomprehension. Eventually, he sends her audio tapes of himself reading books he used to read to her, as both a way to communicate his feelings to her and supposedly give her a chance at redemption by teaching herself to read. An act of mutual redemption for the pain each has given to the other.

There lies another problem with the story that isn’t truly addressed until the penultimate scene: Among the 11 million people – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others – killed during the Holocaust, Hanna has been directly responsible for over 300. And Michael is making this all about him! As if the affront to his feelings was somehow more important than the affront to the victims and their families. The problem isn’t Michael’s self-centeredness, it’s the way the film validates and endorses it by portraying Hanna’s quest to learn how to read and write as some form of redemption, as if being able to read would somehow have made all the difference back then.

Stephen Daldry has always been a somewhat heavy-handed director, but he has distinctly improved since “Billy Elliot”. His shots are more varied and more imaginatively-constructed, and he directs his actors in a way that allows them to interact more naturally within the frame, rather than appear prisoners of the scene’s desired mood as most did in “The Hours”. However, some of his on-the-nose tendencies still persist: The revelation of Hanna’s illiteracy is punctuated by flashbacks to every hint that led to it; Michael’s fateful decision to not visit Hanna in prison loses its efficiency by the show of him turning around and walking back, rather than let his pause and subsequent absence from the line of visitors speak for themselves. While the actors – especially Kate Winslet – perform admirably, the use of German-accented English rather than subtitled German sometimes results in such awkward, unnatural sights as a crowd of spectators shouting “Nazi whore!” at Hanna in German accents, further exposing the film’s artifice.

“The Reader” chooses to emphasize romance and sensuality over its examination of guilt, forgiveness and responsibility. In doing so, it not only wastes its opportunity as a character study, it grossly simplifies one of the worst atrocities ever committed by man.

"Billy Elliot"

Where “Silver Linings Playbook” succeeded in addressing its subject thoughtfully and truthfully while faithfully adhering to a conventional Hollywood structure, “Billy Elliot”, despite not being a Hollywood film, occupies an uncomfortable space somewhere between an examination of masculinity in a working-class environment and an inspirational fable about following one’s dreams. These two aspects seldom work together, not because they are intrinsically mutually exclusive, but rather because of screenwriter Lee Hall’s steadfast commitment to the plot at the expense of the themes and ideas he raises, not helped by director Stephen Daldry’s relatively safe approach.

The titular character’s plight – an 11 year-old miner’s son discovering a love for ballet – as well as its setting in the 1984 – 1985 strike, offer tremendous potential for a compelling portrait of a boy caught in a difficult time and place. Alas, it is squandered by its stubborn refusal to go any deeper than easily-identifiable, predictable schemes:  Billy (Jamie Bell) spends his boxing money on dancing, gets caught by his dad. Billy practices in secret with his tough-as-nails teacher Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters), misses an important audition due to his striking brother Tony’s arrest, gets exposed again. Cue a Dark Night Of The Soul, followed by an obligatory return to form and 180 from his dad. Suddenly, all pretense of studying masculinity and class is dropped. All that’s left is the big race for the dream. Billy’s success is a foregone conclusion. Hall and Daldry’s attempts at suspense ring hollow because it is unearned.

Thus the story’s political context gets reduced to a couple of plot contrivances – Tony’s arrest that prevents Billy’s audition, and his father’s breaking of the strike to earn more money for another audition in London. Billy’s relationship with his gay effeminate cross-dressing best friend Michael remains safe and devoid of tension or real unease; Billy never once questions his own sexuality, is never conflicted over his friend’s feelings for him despite having been raised in the same hyper-masculine environment that oppresses him. Because he is contradicting traditional gender stereotypes, the movie assumes, he surely has no issue with his best friend contradicting them even further.

This safe approach is mirrored in Stephen Daldry’s competent but fairly pedestrian direction: Musical training montages, shots that only illustrate what the script says without trying to extrapolate any possible hidden feeling… The only sequence where Daldry truly uses the cinematic medium and combines it with dancing as a means to express and understand Billy’s feelings is a truly astonishing sequence in which Billy vents out his anger after a heated row between his father and Mrs. Wilkinson. With a wider variety of camera angles and shot lengths, held together by dynamic editing and the Jam’s Town Called Malice, Daldry takes a break from merely telling the audience what Billy is feeling and instead chooses to actually express it.

The only other notable instance of Daldry going off the beaten track is Tony’s arrest. Set to the tune of the Clash’s London Calling, the scene depicts Tony being pursued through a series of houses by an army of riot police. Things are made even more bizarrely comical by the variety of obstacles Tony runs through and the slight speeding up of the police’s movements, giving the chase a slapstick tone reminiscent of old silent Keystone Kops shorts. This lightly satirical touch is as close as Daldry comes to making his historical setting really matter.

“Billy Elliot” could have been a thought-provoking exploration of how gender and class stereotypes conflate and affect the protagonist’s perception of himself and the environment he grows up in. Instead, it ends up being yet another “Rocky”-inspired success story minus the authenticity. For a more successful and similarly crowd-pleasing story of a character transcending gender and class prejudices for self-expression – as well as a greater purpose, audiences should instead turn to Peter Cattaneo’s “The Full Monty”.