Dealing With the Dead

As film critics have been releasing their many "best of 2020" lists, I've been careful to note titles showing up with regularity. One is a documentary available on Netflix called Dick Johnson Is Dead, from Kirsten Johnson (who worked on Citizenfour and others before taking the director's reins herself).

The genesis of Dick Johnson Is Dead came when Kirsten Johnson's father began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. Kirsten had lost her mother (Dick's wife) to the same disease a decade earlier, and had seen firsthand how a loved one can become lost in another sense, even before actual death. This documentary serves as a response, a coping mechanism. It's a form of stoic gallows humor, staging a variety of alterative accidental deaths for the cameras, ways that might claim Dick's life while leaving his dignity more intact. As the film is made over the course of years, Dick Johnson's memory slowly deteriorates, and the notion of using him as an actor in a variety of his own staged deaths looks increasingly cruel.

This movie is not as hard to watch as you might imagine. Dick Johnson is a truly warm and bright soul, and the way he and Kirsten confront reality brings a surprising lightness to the proceedings. It's genuinely funny at times.

Nevertheless, you see a clear deterioration of Dick's mental faculties over the course of the film's 90 minutes. Though there may be moments of lightness, that unyielding fact is still not going to be easy to watch, and harder still for anyone who has actually lost a loved one to dementia. There are powerful moments throughout the film that expose the audience to this reality. In these moments, Dick Johnson Is Dead is fairly universal and easy to empathize with.

But this movie is also one way of facing Alzheimer's, and a possibly odd and definitely flamboyant one at that. To the degree this gives Dick or Kirsten any comfort, I don't begrudge them that. To the degree that it sometimes feels like watching a stranger's home movies, my personal engagement with this film waned at times.

I also did not engage with the movie on another level that the critics seem to be crowing about. Most of the people rating Dick Johnson Is Dead the highest are praising the way it explores "integrity in documentary filmmaking" -- questions of whether a documentary is too often manipulated by its director, whether the very act of observing it with the camera alters what's being documented, and so forth.

As Kirsten Johnson herself is very much a participant in this documentary and not just a chronicler, I don't feel like these questions run especially deep in this case. It is certainly a question whether Kirsten is inflicting harm on her own father for the sake of making a movie, but I'm not convinced this movie digs in all that deeply on the subject. It's perhaps there if you want to excavate it, but I feel that the most enamored critics are praising the experience for not "spoon-feeding" you answers, where I feel like it barely suggests much of an answer at all.

There are absolutely moments in Dick Johnson Is Dead that moved me. Overall though, I find it hard to recommend -- and harder still, given the subject matter. I'd give it a C+. Many critics have it on their Top 10 of 2020 lists, but it wouldn't make mine.