Movie Review - Dick Johnson Is Dead

Kirsten Johnson is a cinematographer who has been working in the film industry for over 20 years. She's worked on numerous documentary films, including titles that have been nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars. Examples are The Invisible War (2012) and Citizenfour (2014). The latter even won the Academy Award in that category. She even directed a few documentaries herself. Her most critically-acclaimed work was Cameraperson (2016). In that film, Johnson introduced us to her mother who was ailing and in fact dying. This film could be considered a sequel to her 2016 work, which was a memoir of sorts. She continues in memoir mode, this time focusing her camera on her widowed father. There is some symmetry because seemingly Johnson's mother died of Alzheimer's. Ironically, her father is possibly developing the same disease. Whereas Johnson wasn't able to document her mother prior to her decline and eventual death, she is able to document her father and show who he is before his memories and mind are ultimately lost to this horrible condition.

What we essentially get is a portrait of a retired grandfather. While the looming cloud over him is that he is possibly suffering from the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's, the film doesn't really depict that part of it. There is a scene of her father going to the doctor and being asked questions about his memory and mental health. There are even incidents where he'll really get disoriented or confused, possibly putting himself in danger. Yet, we never see those incidents. Perhaps, Johnson wasn't able to catch those incidents on camera or perhaps she is making the conscious choice not to show her father at his worst. She instead shows him as a loving and affable grandfather, as well as an even more loving and affable father to her, going along with whatever she asks. This is perhaps a skewed view and not totally honest depiction. It's not to say that this is not true to who he is now, but it leans more toward hagiography.

This can be a problem when a child is making a film about a parent or loved one. It's not to say that there can't be a filmmaker who makes a film about their parent that is brutally honest. Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003) is one such example. Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (2012) is another. What helps those films to be more comprehensive and balanced picture is those aforementioned films dig more into the history of their subject. Johnson doesn't really dig into the history here of her father. Besides a reference to a heart attack in 1987, not much of what we see here is more than a decade or even five years old. She's not making a biography of her dad. It's more of an ever-present look at how she and her dad are being affected in the here-and-now of the prospects of his future loss and specifically death.

This is fine, but I got the feeling that this film is an eulogy, a memorial that only gives me the bare bones of who this man is and not an in-depth look. One scene reveals that her father's toes are a bit unusual. One could say they're deformed feet but not really. Yet, I was curious if there were any stories there. What did his late wife think or feel about them? There's a scene where Johnson's father visits an old girlfriend in California, but we get no details about their relationship, except that it was during college. How did they get together? When did they break up? What were they like together? Have they kept in touch over the years? It's all rather vague. Other than Johnson's father being a psychiatrist and him being a jovial octogenarian, I'm not sure I walked away with any solid or substantial knowledge about the man.

Most people though will talk about the gimmick of this film, which are the fictional scenes that Johnson crafts. Johnson comes up with these fictional moments depicting her father dying in some way other than mental illness. Usually, the scene will depict an accidental death. Most of it are just random moments that often result in a brutal and bloody demise for her father. Other than the first depiction, which is a bit shocking, the only one that had resonance was a scene where Johnson depicts her father falling down some stairs. This resonates because they do relate a story of Johnson's mother falling down some steps. In that scene, Johnson reinforces the parallel of both her parents suffering from the same disease and how the fear of what happened to her mother echoes with her fear of what will happen to her father. Otherwise, the other fake deaths don't resonate at all.

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and macabre images.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 30 mins.

Available on Netflix.