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.
