Descansa en paz, Dick Johnson

A movie about a retired psychiatrist named Richard Johnson who pretends to be a stiff, and there's not one dick joke. Freud is rolling over in his grave.

As made by his daughter, Kirsten Johnson, "Dick Johnson is Dead" is an amusing picture for a documentary about an old widower with worsening dementia moving into a one-bedroom New York apartment with his daughter who films different ways of killing him. The expounding on dying--you know, that everybody's doing it--isn't very profound. The brief overview of the Johnson family's Seventh-day Adventism even less so. The loss of memory is a bit more interesting as it relates to documentary filmmaking, and Kirsten's late mother and Dick's late wife's photography. At one point, Kirsten laments that the only film she made of her mother was when she was well into being affected by Alzheimer's Disease. Although it has been far from always the case, there is a general sense that photographs and motion pictures may outlive the people in them and the memories thereof. Appropriately, then, the documentary is made in the reflexive mode, exposing the filmmaking process, including the staging of Dick's death scenes, and including the filmmaker as a heard and seen presence in the picture.

Apt as much of that is, what really sells "Dick Johnson is Dead" is the charm of its eponymous would-be corpse. This guy has life figured out. Eat chocolate cake and ice cream and crack jokes with friends and family, don't let stuff bother you too much, and if you're not sure what to do, take a nap or watch TV. The movie may get carried away with some of the heavenly imagery and interludes with cutouts and at other times not seem to be going much of anywhere, but it's worth sticking around for that wisdom from the demented dead man.

To help her dad (and herself) cope with his declining health and eventual death, a woman stages fake accidents that kill her father. They're all fake, of course. They play to laughs, and inspire the title of the film, but they're really only a small aspect of the film on the whole. The story mostly focuses on their relationship and shows how special Dick Johnson is as a father, a grandfather, and a human being. He is lovable, hilarious, and perpetually happy. Everyone loves this man. You'll love him too. And you'll love this movie. It's an incredibly nuanced and intelligent examination of death, but it wisely disguises itself as a comedy so viewers can watch without openly weeping the entire time. In the end, you'll still cry, but you'll smile too.

In what I think of as one of the greatest TV series of all time, The Leftovers, the show asks how we cope in the face of death, how the living keep going when there are no answers. In the docu-drama-hagiography-family-portrait Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson is asking herself those same questions in the knowledge that her 86 year old father, Dick, has Alzheimer's. Having watched her mother's slow decline and disappearance due to the same disease, she knows the terrible fate that is coming, and she decides to record these final years with her dad as he is, as she wants to remember him.

The answers Dick Johnson is Dead comes up with are a far cry from the grieving tone struck by The Leftovers. If you read the above and thought "Well that's going to be depressing"; you could not be more wrong. It is, of course, tinged with the anticipation of grief, but what shines through clearer than anything is the love Kirsten and Dick have for each other, and his unflappable, can-do spirit. This film is a celebration of the time that they have together, even though it may be ending.

Laced throughout footage of Dick selling up his house, packing up his office, and moving in with his daughter are strange fantasy sequences in which Kirsten stages her fathers death in a variety of ways. Some are outrageous, some are sad, but we are never asked to believe in them - throughout it is clear they are manufactured, and their purpose is to help Kirsten, and the audience, to imagine what it will be like when Dick finally does succumb to the inevitable. There are also fantasy sequences in which Dick imagines what it might be like when he arrives in heaven, with his wife, Freud, and Bruce Lee all waiting for him.

It's a bizarre choice that pays off handsomely. Death is always with us but we rarely look straight at it. Kirsten and Dick make a courageous decision acknowledge it, talk about it, visualise it. It suggests, despite our fears, that we can handle the worst life will throw at us. Principally though, this is a picture of a father and a daughter, of their quirky ways, and of the bonds that bind them.

The Leftovers ultimately suggested we are terribly alone in the universe, and we must fight hard to grab what life and love we can when we have the chance. Dick Johnson is Dead suggests that love is here with us right now, and we have only to open our eyes to see (and maybe make a home movie of) every precious second.

Dick Johnson seems like a very nice guy, and it was very nice of him to do this with his daughter. Kirsten Johnson seems like a very nice woman, and this film is like a valentine to her Dad. But now we come to the film itself, which I wanted to see because the overwhelming majority of professional critics loved it. And honestly, I have no idea why. While the film had its moments, much of it was pretty boring, especially the slow-motion fantasy sequences with glitter in the air.

This film kind of reminded me of Sarah Polley's, "Stories We Tell," which was another personal story about something that happened to her family. Good people, but unless you knew the family, I didn't think it was very interesting. Most film critics inexplicably loved that one too.

It's rare that a movie with so much good stuff in it is also quite frustrating.

At the risk of going on too long: the main problem for me was the tone. The darkly comedic fantasy sequences never quite meshed with the far more effective (and more frequent) parts of the film that nakedly deal with the inevitability of death, and the immense struggles of aging. There was one fantasy sequence which was surprising moving in a really surreal way, until it clunkily featured an intentionally jarring gag, and I was pulled right out of feeling something profound.

I just... wasn't on this movie's level- I could tell I really liked it, and almost felt like I could love it, but it never sat 100% right with me. The whole premise of killing him in make believe ways never seemed to gel with the genuine emotions of the more down to earth stuff, and it left me a bit confused. There was surely an intent and a purpose, but it's one I can't grasp.

I know there's something here I'm missing, and the stuff I got I know I really liked, so I can still say it's a good movie for sure. But it's almost like I'm missing a part of my brain that would enable me to fully "get" this movie, y'know? Almost as confusing for me as I'm Thinking of Ending Things was 😅