Dick Johnson Is Dead

Renowned documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, whose directorial debut, Cameraperson (2016) chronicled her life and career via outtakes of footage shot for numerous movies she filmed over many years in several countries, faces the impending death of her 85-year-old father in her second feature Dick Johnson is Dead. Her titular Dad is a warm, good-natured fellow suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Dreading life without him, Johnson undertook this biographical film that explores her pop’s life, personality, career as a psychiatrist, and background as a Seventh Day Adventist.

What sets her movie apart from the million other very similar documentaries amateur and professional filmmakers produce about their parents is that Johnson has devised a unique hook. Over the course of the movie, she stages multiple deaths scenes that Dick Johnson enacts for her camera. The ostensible premise is that watching her father die over and over will prepare her for the actual loss, and acclimate her to the idea of living without him. Plus it undoubtedly gave them a meaningful project to work on together in his final days.

Johnson films her dad suffering catastrophic falls, having an air conditioner dropped on his head, and other abrupt, violent ends; all staged with the help of professional stuntmen and special effects artists with darkly comedic results.  She also creates a vision of her father’s afterlife aligned with his religious beliefs, in which he is reunited with his late wife. She even produces an elaborate funeral scene that her father attends, in which his friends eulogize him as they would, and will, when the time comes.

The film wants to be a meditation on how we in America deal (or fail to deal) with death, but it never rises above its central gimmick. Most of the film is generic, not especially well-photographed, conversations between the filmmaker and her subject. You can spend your entire life watching similar stuff on YouTube—it’s just that those home movies lack the budget and the fake death scenes of this one. Watching the frail 85-year-old performing in the macabre comedy of those fictional end-of-life episodes feels crass and exploitative rather than charmingly edgy. 

Kirsten Johnson’s reputation is one of integrity, and Dick Johnson seems to be having a lot of fun performing for her camera, so he’s clearly a willing participant in this movie. Still, the question of consent seems less cut-and-dry when dealing with an individual in the throes of dementia. One especially disturbing moment that drives this home is when Dick mistakes the fake blood he’s covered in with actual blood. I know my opinion is in the extreme minority here, as this is one of the most acclaimed documentaries of 2020 but, to my eye, Dick Johnson is Dead is a gimmick movie of diminishing returns that seems to exist more for the benefit of the filmmaker than the viewer (at least this viewer).