By Glenn Dunks
One of the heartiest laughs I have had in months comes towards the end of Dick Johnson is Dead during Dick’s funeral as his best friend pulls out a bugle to play a tune and bid his buddy farewell. Why is it funny? Well, you’ll have to watch the film to find out. But it’s a moment that epitomises what the entire film, directed by Johnson’s daughter, Kirsten Johnson, does so well. It confronts our own morbid idea of life and death and laughs in the face of the idea that we have any sort of real control over our mortality.
For a film about death and grief, Dick Johnson is Dead is also probably one of the funniest movies of the year.
And it’s a very different film to Johnson junior’s previous film, the astonishing Cameraperson, although they do share an equal sense of curiosity built out of bits and pieces of the world around us. In that earlier film, Kirsten Johnson used fragments, off-cuts and deleted scenes from her work as a documentary cinematographer to explore the very role of the documentarian and how that can bleed into a filmmaker’s personal life. Infused with footage from her mother’s dying days suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, it truly felt as if she had created a new kind of cinema. Or at least an evolved form of it.
In her second feature as director, she is attempting something almost just as radical, although yet again uses imagery of her mother as an anchor point to discuss the pain of loss and losing. This time it is also there to accentuate the similar path she worries is happening to her father, Richard. His memory is slipping and is often confused. He is being moved from Seattle to live with Kirsten in her New York City apartment (next door to father of her children, director Ira Sachs) and cries at the realization he will never drive a car again. He seems resigned to the idea of death in some way, able to joke about it any time he has a slice of chocolate cake. And as if to confront that head on, to prepare herself for the inevitable, Kirsten chooses to not only make a film about him and capture his essence, but make a film in which she kills him over and over again.
She achieves this through playful cinematic trickery. Although as she did in Cameraperson, she peels the camera back and allows us to observe that very trickery through stuntmen and fake blood. In one very humorous moment she asks him if he could look more mangled and, well, as if he really has fallen down the stairs. It’s murky terrain for Johnson to wade as a filmmaker, potentially exploitative and almost certainly in bad taste to a degree. But amid these scenes of violent fantasia, the pair share memories and experiences that ultimately bring them closer.
Kirsten uses dream-like sequences filmed in glossy colour to create her father’s idea of heaven where a young Fred and Ginger dance behind masks made of photographs of her parents when they were younger. She uses cinema to not just kill Richard a lot, but also to redraft history and cure Richard of the emotionally scarring body disability that has followed him since birth. Confetti rains down around a chocolate fountain. It’s exactly the sort of strangely endearing thing one should probably have expected, and yet it is a sweet and, I suppose, beguiling surprise.
Are Dick and Kirsten afraid of his death? It’s impossible not to be. But through Dick Johnson is Dead, there’s some sort of catharsis. For us, too. Certainly, for many who may be seeing their own parents get frail and weak, this surprisingly charming documentary may illuminate on how precious it can be to be honest about the realities of life and of death.
For some audiences this may appear extremely morbid, and perhaps it is. But by film’s end, by the time that bugle blasts and the eulogies have been spoken, it has become celebratory as much as it is profound. Kirsten Johnson has yet again found the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Release: Streaming globally on Netflix from Friday the 2nd of October.
Oscar chances: Normally I would say it's far afield from Oscar's usual tastes, but Johnson's Cameraperson somehow just as improbably made the Oscar shortlist back in 2016. And I don't think it's entirely unfair to assume many in the branch will not only have worked with her but respect what she is doing with the medium. On the other hand, Netflix will likely have a lot of options to promote.