Written by Brenda Frawley

Edited by Matt Wilson

WARNING: SPOILERS ALERT

 

Jon is a good looking, charming guy who helpfully uses voice over to outline to us his priorities in life - his body, his fancy apartment (which he can somehow afford on a bartender's wages), his car and his porn. Yes - his porn. For this is not the romantic comedy one might have expected from the posters, trailers and cast list. Oh no, this is a movie with an important message for our times. Joseph Gordon Levitt has had a sit down and a think about modern life and relationships and here makes his directorial debut with a movie that has big ambitions that it ultimately can't quite fulfill.

Jon and his friends hit the clubs and scope out the female talent, charmingly assigning them marks out of ten. Jon will not go home with anyone under an 8 and is on the constant search for a 'dime', i.e. a perfect ten. He finds this elusive creature in the shapely form of Scarlett Johansson’s Barbara, and who can argue with that? Barbara and Jon become a couple and she is, of course, a shrew who wants to change everything about him to transform him into the ideal man she sees in the romantic comedies she loves. The kind of man who gives up everything for the woman he loves, which is represented by Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway in an amusing spoof film within the film.

Yet for Jon, real sex with a real woman cannot compare to the instant and immediate gratification of online porn where every position and fantasy is just a click away and one is spared the bother of making an effort to please one's partner. Soon both Barbara and Jon find that a real relationship is nothing like the movies and an argument over Jon’s incessant porn use drives them apart.

As part of Barbara's plan for Jon's transformation she sends him to night school to better himself. While there he meets an older woman played by the ever radiant Julianne Moore and they strike up a spiky friendship of sorts. As Jon’s horizons and expectations expand he becomes dissatisfied with his shallow life and strives to become a better person capable of a real connection with another fully engaged human being.

This is ambitious stuff for a first time film-maker and Levitt is to be commended for taking on such a challenge. It is one of the sad truths of modern life that easy and pervasive access to pornography can create ridiculous expectations of what sex should be like and also that these expectations can be harmful to both women and men. Parallels are also drawn between the equally ridiculous expectations fostered by generic romantic comedies and their foolish, clichéd portrayals of relationships. I just wish it had tried just a bit harder to follow through on these ambitions and not succumbed to some of the same tired tropes that are being so justifiably satirized (the working class Italian American background, shouty family members used for comic relief, the sad older woman teaching the younger man about the real world and so on). There is much to admire here, especially the committed and warm performances by all the cast. Perhaps in time Levitt will get a chance to hone his talents and produce a work that lives up to his obvious sincerity and ambition.