So Is This Movie

Dick Johnson Is Dead a film by Kirsten Johnson.  With Dick Johnson, Kirsten Johnson, and assorted others.  *

According to the IMDb website, “On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 75 reviews.”  I’m utterly dumbfounded by that fact.

The basic premise of this movie is not just bewildering to me—as a person whose mother suffered from serious dementia—but rather offensive.  Kirsten Johnson’s mother had Alzheimer’s.  There is a brief film clip of her where she exhibits the classic symptoms: she seems withdrawn and mousey, totally disoriented, and can’t remember her daughter’s name.  I saw a few patients like that at the assisted-living facility where my mother lived and found it heartbreaking.

A few year’s later, Johnson’s father—who had been a psychiatrist—began to exhibit his own signs of dementia.  His daughter apparently had a dream in which he sat up in a coffin and said, “I’m Dick Johnson and I’m not dead yet.”  Inspired by that, she somehow decided to create a movie in which she staged various phony deaths for him—having an air conditioner fall on his head, falling down some stairs, getting struck in the neck by a wayward piece of lumber and bleeding to death—and enlisted her father to enact these scenes.

For some reason or other—out of love for his daughter, I assume—he consented.[1]  The result is this movie, which also includes conversations with the father, scenes of leaving his Seattle home and moving in with his daughter, a few surrealistic scenes of the afterlife, and a goofy dance number that I did think was funny and inspired.  Maybe two good scenes in the whole ninety minutes.  The rest of the movie was bizarre and dull.  It’s hard to be both of those things at the same time, but this movie pulls it off.

At the heart of the movie are these staged scenes of accidental death.  Is Kirsten Johnson trying to get used to the idea that her father will die?  She can do that with a simple conversation: the man is dying before her eyes.  Is she imagining something will happen so that he will die, and spare him the anguish of living with a demented mind?  She doesn’t say that.

She doesn’t even present the staged scenes as real: she shows how they’re faked.  What’s the point of putting an 86-year-old man through these enactments, which he doesn’t seem to understand (and he ain’t the only one) and doesn’t really do?  Stunt doubles do the real work.  She even stages a scene in which he is rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and, as far as the audience is concerned, actually dies.  We assume that’s what we’re seeing.

Yet he’s not dead.  He’s apparently alive to this day.

She also holds a mock funeral at his Seventh Day Adventist church, in which people talk about the man as he is standing in the choir loft listening, then he comes in from the back and shakes hands and hugs people who were eulogizing him.  In that scene, his best friend—a man who seems older than Johnson—delivers a eulogy during which he cannot stop sobbing, and embarrasses himself by trying to play a musical farewell that is a total flop.  Even as Dick Johnson comes into the sanctuary to embrace everyone, that man is still sobbing in a corner.  What the hell was the point of all that?

This movie is right on the edge of elder abuse.  As far as I’m concerned, it sometimes crosses that line.

When my own mother was seriously demented, I went to my Zen teacher and told her my struggles: I wanted my mother to be free from suffering, but the only way I could imagine that happening was if she died, and I didn’t want to be hoping for her death.  My teacher said to me: “Your mother is dead.  The woman you loved for all those years and who was such a help to you for so many years is no longer here.  Just do what you can for this woman to make her comfortable in the time she has left.”  That remark was enormously helpful to me.

I can imagine a documentary which examines this situation in which a man is still here but the essence of him no longer is, a movie that looks at the sadness and difficulty of all that and does so in a respectful way.  I can also imagine a work of art which gives us the emotional reality of dealing with dementia, but I don’t have to imagine it: The Father already that beautifully, and Anthony Hopkins does a marvelous job of portraying a demented man.  If you want to see the reality of the situation, watch The Father.

But don’t watch Dick Johnson Is Dead.  It’s confused about what it’s doing, and will leave you sad and angry for all the wrong reasons.

[1] I’m not suggesting she doesn’t love her father.  She obviously does, and they get along beautifully.