As Mortes de Dick Johnson

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.

I have never seen a movie like this one. It's extremely personal and it tackles a heavy subject in a strange way. Somehow, it all works extremely well.

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.

Dying is about the deadliest topic in any medium partly because it reminds us of our last end, or as Alexander Pope said, "Send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." An accomplished documentarian, Kirsten Johnson, takes that topic and makes it a sweet future as she orchestrates scenarios for her father's death with him starring while alive in Dick Johnson is Dead.

It is as if she believes that playing with a bit of gallows humor might at least stave off the Alzheimer's disease for her dad that her mother succumbed to a few years ago. The magic part of this unusual documentary is the love of father and daughter evident in every light-hearted scene. Be he knocked dead by a construction beam or actually experience a heart attack, she and he are collaborating on this doc as professionals (he is a psychiatrist) who know enough about life to make death an acceptable adjunct to a life that was worth living.

Dick Johnson is not much as an actor depicting his own death, but he is a father who has loved his child, his late wife, and his friends, of which he has a multitude. His love shines through in each frame making this the most realistic fictionalized death on film this year (and most likely the only one).

My other favorite doc this year is David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, which also defeats the death of earth through our own collaboration with Nature. In both films, life is affirmed in the face of daunting realities such as our responsibility for choking the atmosphere or just living till we die.

Kirstin's loving handling of a potentially crippling topic is a tribute to her as an accomplished filmmaker who can create in the face of heavy emotional weight. It is even more a tribute to her as a daughter who loves her father unconditionally and forever-a state she uses to keep her dad in her mind forever.

"Because I could not stop for death-He kindly stopped for me." Emily Dickinson

Thanks to my daughter, Thea, who tipped me off to this exceptional doc-we share several sympathies with the film.