Don Jon is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s first film as a writer and a director, and he came so close to making a great film. But my wife and I both felt he lost his nerve at the critical juncture, and instead he merely succeeded in making a cute film, one that is definitely worth seeing, but not the surprising, challenging, ground-breaking film it might have been.

Don Jon is a pretty normal guy, with a job he likes, a nice house he takes care of, a strong circle of friends, and a meaningful family life and religious faith. Sexually there are two things going on: he jerks off to a lot of internet porn, and he’s a bit of a player with the women – he’s getting a lot of ass, for sure, but in his narration he admits porn does something for him that real-life sex does not. What is unspoken but right in plain sight is that the women in his life are a bunch of self-obsessed, sexually repressed airheads who are lousy in bed, and themselves not really looking for a mutual relationship or a deep erotic connection. This trend reaches its apex with the Scarlett Johansson character, who is positively frightening: a manipulative, castrating, agenda-driven, me-first woman who emotionally controls him via sex and every other avenue. And when she discovers his porn habit, she shames him terribly, implying he is twisted and sick, and laying down her law: it’s either her or the porn, and Jon must decide.

What opens up such interesting possibilities in the movie is the Julianne Moore character (who was almost completely omitted from the preview,) the plain, middle-aged hippy chick he meets in the night class Scarlett Johansson is forcing him to take. She does not have a problem with sexuality (on seeing him watching porn on his phone in class, she responds by bringing to their next class a DVD of better porn for him to try!) nor is she stuck in a manipulative, self-obsessed dream world. She’s what you might call a real woman: thoughtful, sensual, empathetic, erotic, brave and open-minded, alive on the planet. She quickly forms a very interesting and deep connection with Jon – sexually, emotionally, and psychologically – one which changes his life forever.

Everything is great up to this point in the film. If only Levitt had taken the idea through to completion, and resisted the impulse to cave to our societal fear of sex. The message of Don Jon is when he opens his heart to “pure love”, he can have boring missionary sex with Julianne Moore and it’s the greatest thing in the world, forever freeing him from his “terrible” porn habit. This is just silly and disappointing. How much more powerful it would have been if he and Moore had instead launched a relationship of rip-roaring, unselfconscious sex of all varieties, and for Jon to learn that sexuality is not the morally segmented phenomenon our society tells us it is. Perhaps his craving for sexual excitement or exhibitionism is not really aberrant, and with a partner who does not have a problem with sex it might become naturally integrated into his real life, instead of staying marginalized. He might even find himself watching less porn (who really cares if he totally gives it up?) if he has Julianne Moore riding him like a bucking bronco every night.

When we went to this film, a full two months into its run at the Union Square 14, I expected the theater to be empty; it was practically sold out. I think all these people are packing theaters for Don Jon because they secretly want a socially acceptable and morally defensible way to watch porn clips, even the half-assed fake ones used for this film. They also want to see a story where Jon gives up porn and is immediately rewarded with real-life Scarlett Johansson! When he falls for homely, pot-smoking, badly-dressed Julianne Moore, I could tell the audience was in total shock (I thought it was great, of course.) If Julianne Moore had been a sex manic, it might have caused widespread cerebral hemorrhaging. Now that I think of it, maybe its better that Levitt played it conservatively.