Offbeat doc on Alzheimer’s disease
Dick Johnson Is Dead Rated: PG-13 for thematic elements and macabre images. Running time: 89 minutes. Begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, Oct. 2. of 4
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About the time a portable air conditioner unit drops from the sky and kills her father, it’s obvious that Kirsten Johnson is not making the usual documentary about Alzheimer’s disease and losing a parent.
That’s just a few minutes into “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” which premieres on Friday, Oct. 2, on Netflix. The man who gets conked by the air conditioner is actually a stuntman standing in for her father, and it is the first of several fake movie deaths that Dick
Johnson will willingly suffer.
Kirsten Johnson doesn’t, of course, really want to kill off her father. She fears it. After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she is scared, and so is he. As it comes just a decade or so after her mother — Dick’s wife — died of Alzheimer’s-related causes, both are familiar with the long slide into dementia.
So these elaborate deaths — which would have been at home in a 1980s lowbudget horror flick, complete with the props, special effects and a stunt crew — are a filmmaker’s means of coping. And dad is in on the scheme, and delightfully so. He is a psychologist, still practicing into his early 80s (the Alzheimer’s diagnosis forced his retirement), and understands the therapeutic value of this playacting.
He even gets a kick out of it. He and his daughter seem to share the same sense of macabre humor.
Most elaborate is the filmmaker’s vision of heaven, created on a soundstage and based on the family’s Seventh-day Adventist faith
and, apparently, old Hollywood musicals.
Kirsten Johnson doesn’t make documentaries so much as personal essays. Her last film, “Cameraperson,” was a rumination
on her 25 years as a cinematographer on documentaries, work that has taken her all over the world. “Dick Johnson Is Dead” mainly takes place in Seattle, where she grew up and where her father lives, and New York, where he moves in with his daughter and becomes a part of her unique domestic relationship: The two different fathers of her two children live in an apartment next door, and they gather with the children for meals.
It’s of course, not all levity. There are several moving moments in the film, as when they pack up and close Dick Johnson’s office, and when father and daughter reminisce about the wife and mother they lost. The father’s easygoing warmth are favored over his deteriorating mental skills, which are ever-present but not dwelled upon.
There’s even a surprise twist ending in “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” which ultimately is less a horror film than a valentine, from a daughter to a father, and a sweet portrait of a man going gently into that good night.