SUNDANCE REVIEW: Dick Johnson is Dead
Dick Johnson is Dead
United States Documentary Competition
Written/Directed by Kirsten Johnson
If I was given the honor of eulogizing C. Richard Johnson, MD, after spending 89 precious minutes with him in his daughter’s lovingly made documentary, Dick Johnson is Dead, I would probably start by saying that he loved his life. He supremely enjoyed the company of his children and grandchildren, he was proud of his multi-decade career in psychiatry, he made some genuine, lifelong friends, and while he missed her everyday, he greatly appreciated the time he had with his wife Catherine, who died in 2007. He had the enviable ability to savor the little things in life – a dark piece of double fudge cake, relaxing into his favorite chair, or singing a dirty song with his grandsons – and was known to express his ecstasy with little phrases like “how sweet it is.” What I admire most about Dick, in our brief relationship, and what I hope to take with me, is that he was game. He was game to having office equipment dropped on his head, taking several terrible spills including down a set of stairs, get in an automobile accident, and be stabbed in the neck to bleed out on the sidewalk. He was game to die and resurrect again and again all for the love of his daughter.
After her father’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, Kirsten Johnson tries to wrest back some control from the inevitability of losing her dad by turning it into her next project. Kirsten Johnson’s first feature length documentary, Cameraperson (2016), was a retrospective on her nearly two decades behind the lens on the crews of such documentaries as The Oath (2010) and Citizenfour (2014). It was an unconventional exploration of what it means to be on the crew of a documentary when it is expected to be unobtrusive and objective. In Dick Johnson is Dead, Johnson’s camera is the opposite of unobtrusive and she is anything but objective. She confronts his mortality head on and heart open by recruiting the help of her fellow filmmakers – stunt men, actors, dancers, camera and sound operators, computer effects people – so that she can watch her dad die, resurrect and be mourned cinematically as a sort of dry run for the real thing. With the special added bonus of getting to hold her Dad’s hand through the whole ordeal.
The film seamlessly blends the behind-the-scenes sequences and the mock death and resurrection scenes with the day-in-the-life material of Kirsten gently relieving her father of his independence – packing up his office, selling his car, moving him into her home, and cautiously observing him as his dementia is increasingly clouds his mind. The death scenes are for Kirsten, so that she can wrap her mind around the idea of ‘Dad is there, and then he is not there.’ They’re gritty, frenetic, and shocking. The resurrection scenes are for Dick. As a devout Seventh Day Adventist, he believes that when Christ returns to earth he’ll take his followers back home with him. His daughter transforms a bright soundstage into a party in the clouds where he dances, dines with the likes of Fredrick Douglass, Bruce Lee and Farrah Fawcett, and is reunited with his Catherine. These scenes are gauzy, playful and celebratory, and against the bright blue firmament filled with clouds and feathers, Dick looks positively luminous. At a certain point, the boundary between experiencing and pretending becomes disorienting. So much so that you’re not sure if Dick Johnson is really dead or just hypothetically dead. The film becomes the box and Dick Johnson becomes Schrödinger’s cat.
I feel privileged that Kirsten Johnson invited us to share this piece of her and her Dad’s story. Some of the most moving scenes are those that are decidedly and starkly real – intimate conversations between Father and Daughter about life and death. Often the camera is not pointed or composed, but rather set aside staring at a piece of carpet, a leg of a table, as we eavesdrop on a tearful, fearful conversation. Dick doesn’t seem to be afraid of death but rather the idea of being a burden on Kirsten. At one point, he refers to himself as Kirsten’s “little Brother who tags along behind and gets in the way.” He saw himself as a naïve, dependent pest. She assures him that little Brothers are a fun and not an annoyance at all. There is nothing more universal than the death of one’s parents. It’s been on my mind more recently, with the death of my Grandmother last month. The last time I saw her was last March for my Grandpa’s 100th birthday and she suffered a few strokes and when I looked into her eyes, I knew part of her was not there anymore. Grandpa, who is coming up on his 101st birthday, doesn’t feel like that. He’s frailer, less mobile, but still fully present with all his faculties and guile. Sometimes it feels like it will take an inkjet printer from a second story window to take the man down. Death comes for each of us in its own time – sometimes in pieces, other times all at once. Mourning happens in much the same way. Film is an important tool for us to give our empathy its own dry run of the terrible, beautiful and only imaginable.
Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is dead will become available for streaming on Netflix.
