The sheer volume of movies available through theaters, home entertainment and services like Netflix can make it difficult to discern the good from the bad and the ugly in the world of cinema. To help you out, Alternative Reel takes a major studio release and picks out an alternative film of a similar genre, theme or style for you to check out as a comparative primer.
Don Jon, the feature directorial debut from star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is about a man who appears to have the formula for a perfect lifestyle down pat. “There’s only a few things I really care about,” the titular Jon – played by Gordon-Levitt – informs usin gruff voiceover, “my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls and my porn.”
Wait, what?
Originally titled Don Jon’s Addiction, Gordon-Levitt’s new film follows the exploits of Jon Martello, a tough-but-handsome Jersey boy who just so happens to be dealing with a crippling addiction to pornography.
Despite the topic’s implicit taboo and explicit content, sex addiction remains a point of morbid fascination for popular culture, and Gordon-Levitt certainly isn’t the first filmmaker to brave an exploration of what drives the obsessed. Back in 2011, English artist and director Steve McQueen took to analyzing carnal compulsion in his sophomore effort Shame, a film that is about as chilly and clinical as Don Jon appears to be genial and lighthearted.
As in Don Jon, Shame centers on a man, here named Brandon (Michael Fassbender), who has the requisite traits of an ultra-masculine alpha male. Brandon is lean, fetching and wealthy. He lives in a modish New York high-rise marked by a cleanliness bordering on sterility and has a successful job at a blank-faced corporation.
Given his suave, calculated exterior, Brandon effortlessly scores any girl in bed, serving as a cool foil to his unctuous boss David, a loser who also happens to be Brandon's only friend.
No amount of game satiates our protagonist's thirst for intimacy, however, and Brandon spends a sizeable portion of the movie despondently screwing half of NYC with an expression that registers more as reeling from a bad paper cut than hitting a peak of ecstasy. Few fictional characters can attest to being made miserable by an orgy, but poor Brandon, stony-faced and dead-eyed, grapples with his menage a trois as though it were a Sisyphean burden.
The conceit of someone "having it all" – wealth, looks, charisma – yet remaining miserable isn’t novel, and Shame, though visually ravishing, is also brutally explicit in its depiction of a sex addict’s depravity. “Your hard drive is filthy,” David informs Brandon after clearing his computer of bucket loads of fetishistic porn. "Filthy" is how I felt considering Shame for this column.
Two things make Brandon's infernal spiral downward palatable, really, and their names are Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan.
Fassbender, with his taut, predatory features, brings an understated composure and – perhaps more importantly – a little bit of threat to a role that could’ve easily to dipped into caricature. "I’m sad because I have sex, and I have sex because I’m sad," is pretty much all there is to Brandon on paper, but Fassbender, often through sheer physicality, communicates a broiling angst that sits high above otherwise thin material.
Mulligan, too, deserves a nod for her performance as Sissy, a hot mess of a sister who appears uninvited at Brandon’s apartment one day to muck up his routine. Puffed-up and with a pixie-ish hairdo, Mulligan brings a necessary touch of humor to an otherwise dour affair, though her thread of the story gets grim enough as Brandon ignores her insistent cries for help.
In fact, Shame is never more gripping than when Sissy and Brandon are forced to collide with one another. McQueen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan, smartly eschews any backstory for the two siblings, instead hinting at a bleak and possibly incestuous past that adds a bizarre but frankly scintillating will-they-won’t-they sexual tension into the mix.
Outside of their relationship, the narrative is messy and unfocused, becoming episodic as Brandon, unable to cope with the emotional baggage brought along with his sister, prowls the streets of New York with increasing fervor for a physical release.
Shot in a wash of glum blue hues, McQueen's work is hellish, spare and formally sleek, a character study of a man teetering on the edge of complete ruin. Sex may be the obsession at hand here, but it’s hard for me to think of a movie in recent memory that is this patently unsexy. Fellow NBNer Lucy Wang recently described Don Jon as having a "bottomless supply of humor" in her review, and a little bit of humor may as well be vital considering Gordon-Levitt's film is running in the company of a tortured, unshakable beast like Shame.