Kirsten Johnson (2020)
Kirsten Johnson’s voiceover introduces her father as ‘just the kind of dad you want – open, accepting …’ It’s soon clear too that C Richard (Dick) Johnson has charm and humour to burn. Dick Johnson Is Dead is a truly extraordinary documentary in several ways but its chief asset is the man at its centre – very bright, transparently decent, immensely likeable and endlessly co-operative. His daughter admits at the start of the film she can’t bear the idea of losing him but knows the idea is now becoming reality. Octogenarian Dick, a retired clinical psychiatrist, has been diagnosed with dementia and is ‘starting to disappear’. Kirsten’s mother, who died several years ago, also suffered from Alzheimer’s. A couple of photos capture her vividly young and middle-aged; a fragment of video footage shows the distracted, depleted older woman. It’s distressing to Kirsten this is the only moving-picture record she has of her mother. She’s not letting the same thing happen with her father.
Dick Johnson Is Dead moves from Seattle, where Dick has lived and worked for years, to New York City, his daughter’s home. When his dementia worsens he moves into her Manhattan apartment. (Kirsten, unusually, co-parents her twin children with the film-maker Ira Sachs and his husband, who live in an adjacent apartment.) One sequence shows Kirsten with Marta, an experienced carer of terminally ill patients who has been engaged to help care for Dick. The two women briefly discuss Kirsten’s qualms about the film she’s making. Marta tells Kirsten that Dick’s love for her means ‘he’d let you do anything’. Marta means the remark to reassure but it doesn’t. Although Kirsten knows she mustn’t go beyond what it’s decent to record of her father’s decline, she confesses to being unsure where the boundary is.
A viewer naturally shares Kirsten’s misgivings – this viewer did anyway. I’m predisposed to dislike real-life descriptions of terminal mental decline and sceptical about the value of television documentaries which, in showing people with advanced neuro-degenerative disease, purport to help others who are having or will have to cope with it, either as sufferers or carers. Despite the enthusiastic reception for Dick Johnson Is Dead (a Sundance prizewinner in early 2020 and currently 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes from 88 reviews), I didn’t expect to think well of it but I did, with some reservations. One’s never in doubt from what she says and how she says it that Kirsten Johnson loves her father deeply but that alone wouldn’t be enough to dispel worries that she’s exploiting him. (The families involved in the kind of TV just mentioned no doubt mean well.) It’s Dick who makes the difference. He has consented to Kirsten’s project while still of sound mind; his faculties are clearly in decline but he remains aware of what’s happening to him – and is often witty about it. Kirsten asks whether, when his condition deteriorates, he’d rather not be alive at all. Dick says he loves life too much to be able to imagine preferring non-existence but, he adds good-humouredly, ‘You can euthanise me if you want’. When Kirsten asks if he really means that, he confirms as much ‘but run it past me before you do’.
He seems a man with few regrets beyond the loss of his wife and the badly deformed toes he was born with and has always been ashamed of. He feels the sadness of his fate but accepts it cheerfully. He has, it seems throughout his life, been a practising Seventh Day Adventist and clearly sees the fellowship of churchgoing as salutary, though it’s less clear how much of the Adventist dogma he believes. A visit to the doctor to check on his cognitive condition is a wonderfully eloquent illustration of how well he understands his condition, even as he demonstrates it. The doctor gives him five words to remember – church, daisy, face, red and velvet. (I’m trying to lock them into my brain as I did the words in the corresponding test in Still Alice: stethoscope, hedgehog, millennium, cathode, pomegranate, trellis – if memory serves, which it may not.) The words, as a group, have disappeared in no time although Dick can still retrieve them with prompts that one’s a colour, one’s a material, and so on. He shows a professional medic’s interest in the test and seems to enjoy taking it.
Now to the reservations. Its leading man confers a persistent saving grace on Dick Johnson Is Dead yet the most original aspect, implicit in the film’s title, is stubbornly problematic. Kirsten Johnson keeps staging her father’s death, in different ways but usually as the result of a startling accident: an air conditioner falls from an upstairs window and hits Dick as he walks along the street below; a careless building worker swings a plank into his face. These (and other) incidents make use of stunt doubles and fake blood. The rationale for them seems clear enough. Kirsten instinctively refuses to accept Dick’s actual impending demise. By making him die, she creates repeated opportunities to resurrect him – in two ways. First, the pretend endings of his life are sometimes followed by kitsch visualisations of heaven, where Dick is received and looks ecstatic, especially catching sight of his miraculously transformed toes. Second, he isn’t really dead yet.
The staged deaths are troubling partly because Dick is occasionally a troubled participant in them: he knows what’s going on – his daughter ‘keeps killing me and I keep coming back to life’ – but that doesn’t prevent his being confused and upset by the fake blood, for example. This brings clearly into view the decency boundary that Kirsten is concerned about overlooking. So does a later Halloween episode when Dick, costumed for the occasion, appears to be left alone in the spookily lit apartment while Kirsten and her children are out. When his daughter returns Dick repeatedly expresses relief that she came back and didn’t leave him alone in the dark. She takes the opportunity to describe, in voiceover, the Seventh Day Adventist belief that the faithful, when they die, will remain unconscious until raised to new life at Christ’s second coming; she suggests that fear of being ‘left behind’ is thus fundamental to the Adventist creed. Even if he wasn’t actually left alone on Halloween night (he presumably had a camera operator for company in the apartment), Dick evinces real anxiety at the prospect of being abandoned.
There’s another reason why the mock deaths are uncomfortable to watch. At one point, Dick asks Kirsten why she makes documentaries rather than fictional films ‘where the big bucks are’. Her answer is that she tends to find reality more fascinating than invention. It’s possible to see this documentary as a play on how much screen fiction trades in mayhem that is lethal but also, through its frequent mechanical use, emotionally weightless. As such, it can be used here as a means of de-realising mortality, of ‘distract[ing] from distraction by distraction’. It’s also, however, a means of both extending and gussying up the narrative. Dick Johnson Is Dead runs just short of ninety minutes, which pass quickly. It would be thoroughly absorbing but barely feature-length without the morbid make-believe – and that element, whatever Kirsten Johnson intended, is largely responsible for the degree of admiring attention the film is receiving.
The climax, though, is both a successful coup de théâtre and a moving vindication of the whole piece. Dick Johnson suffered a heart attack when in his mid-fifties. He remembers that, the previous day, he’d eaten three pieces of chocolate cake – a perennial favourite. We watch his grandchildren help Kirsten make a cake for Dick’s eighty-sixth birthday. He pronounces it the best chocolate cake he’s ever eaten ‘and I’ve eaten a lot of them’. Cut to a screen indicating 23rd June 2019 with a soundtrack of concerned voices and an ambulance siren. Dick has evidently had another heart attack. We don’t see or hear him but we gather he has stopped breathing and that paramedics are failing to resuscitate him. This is followed by a funeral service in the Seattle church where Dick worshipped. A microphone is passed around members of the huge congregation who want to say something in remembrance of Dick. A woman describes how he comforted her when her own husband died but, the next time they spoke, asked after her husband’s health. Dick’s best friend, seen earlier in the film, comes to the front of the church to deliver a eulogy. He repeatedly breaks down. Dick, with Kirsten at his side, is shown watching this, transfixed by and upset for his friend – ‘He thinks it’s for real’.
This culminating trompe l’oeil sequence is also confirmation of its themes – inventively futile human denial of death vs its inevitability, celebration of a life worth celebrating vs mourning of its end. Dick’s funeral was staged in Seattle before his move to Kirsten’s home in New York City. At the end of the service, he walks down the church aisle, beaming at his many friends in the pews either side. The whole thing is a put-on but not a put-on. The woman describing her first experience of Dick’s loss of memory is recalling what she knew was the beginning of the end. The best friend’s grief is no pretence: he knows the person he has loved is doomed to go away, to New York and, in time, to oblivion. In the very last scene, Kirsten Johnson repeats ‘Dick Johnson is dead, Dick Johnson is dead’ – acknowledging that these words are, for her, an inescapable mantra. Yet she’s still impelled, she says, to assert ‘Long live, Dick Johnson!’ The closing dedication on the screen is to ‘Dick Johnson, 1932-‘. I don’t know if he technically still is in the land of living. In a sense, that’s irrelevant to his daughter’s priorities in making this remarkable film.
16 February 2021
