'Dick Johnson is Dead': Film Review — Kirsten Johnson's documentary ode to her father is endlessly playful and surprising, says GuyLodge
A profoundly heartfelt cinematic eulogy to the filmmaker’s living father Richard, made with his good-humored collaboration as he slowly slips into the limbo of Alzheimer’s, it also doubles as a witty, thoughtful rumination on death itself, the ways we prepare for it , and what may or may not come next.
A clue as to why Johnson has taken this unconventional, occasionally irreverent approach to a potentially sore subject comes in a brief, quietly lacerating extract of archival footage that binds “Dick Johnson is Dead” to “Cameraperson”: a grainy home video of Johnson’s late mother Katie Jo, deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, struggling to identify her daughter by name or face.
There’s spry comedy in these games and fantasies, but also a sly note of spiritual defiance. Johnson was raised in a conservative Seventh-Day Adventist household, with its austere restrictions on everyday pleasures and its firm belief in Christian mortalism: the notion that, rather than ascending to the afterlife, the souls of believers remain unconscious between death and resurrection, to be awoken only when Christ returns to Earth.
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