Dick Johnson is Dead, review: how to kill your own father in beautiful style
Dir: Kirsten Johnson. 12A cert, 89 mins
Documentaries come and go, but when did you last see one where the filmmaker sets about killing her own father – repeatedly? The conceit of Dick Johnson is Dead seems morbid – even deranged. We’re presented with the smiling, doddery 85-year-old of the title, beloved father to the director, Kirsten Johnson, and grandpa to her twins. He’s a delight – the very model of an affably humble senior citizen. Within minutes, an air conditioning unit has dropped on his head, and he’s dead on a pavement.
This is one way, in his daughter’s worry-addled mind, that her dad might be taken from her. (Afterwards, we get behind-the-scenes glimpses of this stunt being staged, like all the film’s fake deaths.) Dick suffers from dementia, which is steadily advancing but hasn’t claimed all his faculties quite yet. In 2007, the Johnson family lost Dick’s wife, Catherine Joy, from complications after a broken hip gained falling down the stairs. She’d had Alzheimer’s for seven years before this, and both Kirsten and Dick admit that the real Catherine was already long gone.
It’s the lingering pain of her mother’s loss, and the dread of her father going next, that have inspired Johnson to confront the taboo topic of death, and to work through some of its emotions while Dick can still relate and participate. Her doc crashes through the evasive proprieties we tend to observe around family members at the end of their lives. It’s been made with deep love – their conversations have a candour no one could fake. But it’s as wacky and bewildering in its effects as it is inescapably moving.
Dick and his wife are devout Seventh-Day Adventists – the faith into which they raised Kirsten. For this religion’s adherents, death is a kind of waiting room before Christ’s return in judgement. Kirsten goes so far as to stage a kitschy afterlife for the couple – with choruses crooning as they’re reunited, and enlarged photos of their newlywed bliss pasted on the heads of dancers in an Astaire-and-Rogers routine. These sequences have a jubilant tackiness, but no more so than vast acres of Christian art. There’s a liberating charge to the film’s sheer lack of sobriety before, rather than after, the solemn fact of what Americans tend to call “passing”.
Johnson could easily have taken a cue from John Donne here – like his sonnet “Death, be not proud”, her film is about divesting our endgame of its terrors, defying (while also admitting) its sting. It’s a brave filmmaker who gets her own infirm father to lie in a pool of fake blood, at the base of the very stairs where his wife took her tumble.
If these ever feel like cruel ruses for Dick to have to play along with – especially as his mental capacity starts to slow down – we’re made well aware of the filmmaker’s own moral qualms in this area, which are characteristically woven into the film’s fabric. Her first feature, 2016’s Cameraperson, was a self-critical investigation into what it means to both shoot and stage “the truth”, compiled as a collage of all Johnson’s earlier non-fiction cinematography.
She wanted to set her dad on fire here; to put him out to sea on an iceberg – gambits which would have crossed a line for his personal safety, even using stuntmen, as many of her sequences do. Fascinating oddments abound, like the fact that a disproportionate number of stunt performers commit suicide, perhaps because their intimate relationship to death has numbed certain reflexes.
Fortifying this film throughout is Dick’s commitment to it as an eccentric project that’s worth all the effort, from which we intuit a beaming sense of paternal pride and pleasure in collaboration. When he moves into Kirsten’s small apartment and asks to be treated like a little brother – a dependent, now – it’s the kind of lightning-stroke insight on camera which justifies everything else they’re doing.
And if the balance of devotion sometimes feels tipped in Kirsten’s favour – Dick does put up with a lot, the poor guy – she tips things back with the lavish climactic gift of her dad’s very own resurrection. First, she manages to persuade everyone Dick knows to suit up and sit in church, while he’s faking it in a casket. Who hasn’t dreamed of attending their own funeral? Concluding the service by walking down the aisle, delightedly consoling the bereaved in the most life-affirming of all this film’s stunts, Dick’s joy at acting out this fantasy is wondrous to behold.
Dick Johnson is Dead is streaming on Netflix from Friday
