Dick Johnson Is Dead

Outwardly, Dick Johnson Is Dead is an intimate portrait of the director’s father, who had begun to exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer’s, the same disease that her mother (and his wife) had suffered from. However, the touching video diary recording the relationship between two people who know what is coming comprises only one level of this unusually conceived documentary. ___ The filmmaker inserts shots of Johnson, who realises that he is losing memories and is becoming dependent on the assistance of others, into a more general contemplation of loss, forgetting and inevitability of endings, which are beyond our control and imagination. Despite that, we try to somehow come to terms with them. For director Kirsten Johnson, playful mystification is a coping mechanism. She stages various ways in which her father may die (the film opens with a beautifully morbid scene in which a loose air-conditioner falls on his head), as well as his funeral and afterlife (the deliberately fake-looking scenes with Jesus are reminiscent of the work of Baz Luhrmann). She does this so inventively that on a few occasions you will not be sure whether you are watching reality or another dramatherapy performance enabling the director to at least partially prepare for the departure of her other parent and the father to experience what he will not live to see. ___ Instead of just another film about Alzheimer’s that starts out sad and gradually becomes increasingly melancholy, Johnson created a mood-altering blend of black comedy, eschatological musical and self-reflexive family drama that is very sensitive toward social actors and contains truth somewhere between fiction and reality, between the space in front of the camera and behind it. 85% (10/11/2020)