Gutsy move releasing a movie called Dick Johnson Is Dead around Halloween. For those looking for cheap thrills and kills, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But I hope, as I did, you’ll find in Dick Johnson Is Dead something much more interesting, and emotionally affecting, than a scantily clad dimwitted co-ed being gutted by a psychopath.
Kirsten Johnson, the documentarian, is Dick’s father. After a successful life filled with family, friends, and fun, Dick is nearing the end of his life, which Kirsten decides to help him with…by filming various ways he could die, and what heaven would look like. Seems morbid right? But there’s a reason behind this strange setup.
For, as the doc slowly unveils and hits you like a sack of bricks, Dick is in the early onset of Alzheimer’s, the same disease that took his wife seven years earlier. That experience taught him to live and enjoy his life at the moment. Johnson uses these fantasy sequences to help her father, while he’s still lucid, to prepare for the afterlife, and maybe even experience a little bit of it before day to day living becomes too hard. The movie runs the emotional gamut as a result: you’re laughing along with Dick and Kirsten at the little gags and joys of filming this documentary, which quickly turns into heartbreak as reality continually threatens to burst through this little fantasy they’re filming.
As Dick Johnson gets closer and closer to the title’s suggestion, more melancholy occurs than joy more frequently. We see father and daughter struggle with this burden, particularly daughter, who has to slowly watch her hero/best friend’s mind leave his body. But as Kirsten intersperses, the joy is not gone. It’s just lessened. Dick knows this, at clings harder to the great moments as they happen, like a surprise chocolate cake for his birthday. Dick Johnson Is Dead is, as a result, a wonderful coping mechanism for Kirsten and a lovely movie to show anyone who’s going to have to deal with a family member who has Alzheimer’s.
Death is a tough subject to broach with people, because of it’s finality. Alzheimer’s might be even worse, because it’s like dying while being alive. Dick Johnson Is Dead knows this, so it tries to lighten the mood a little, to make the permanence of this situation more interesting and less scary, a lovely reminder that a little light can drown out even the darkest of darkness.