Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020, Kirsten Johnson) (Patreon)

67/100

Relevant personal context: My own father is 75, and while he's in reasonably good health (apart from having been obese for most of his adult life), I've begun mentally preparing for the likelihood that he won't be around much longer. The past couple of months, in fact, have found me working—very slowly, with weeks-long breaks—on a draft of the speech that I anticipate being asked to deliver at his memorial service, because I want to send him the text while he's alive, rather than say those things only after he's gone. More or less the professional writer's equivalent of what Kirsten Johnson does here. 

Consequently, I'm more than a little surprised that the film didn't wreck me, nor even hit me especially hard. Perhaps I'd heard too much about it in advance (something I try but can't always manage to avoid), creating expectations that neither Johnson nor Dick Johnson had any intention of meeting. The various mock deaths, in particular, weren't cathartic in the way that I'd hoped for, coming across as mere goofs; certainly there's a thumb-in-the-eye aspect to that, but it leaves other, deeper emotions largely unplumbed (at least until the very end). That Johnson and her dad share such a loving, healthy, mutually supportive relationship...this sounds kind of awful, I realize, but it doesn't "help," in the sense that it's too admirable to be of much dramatic interest. Not that I wanted or needed outright rancor, please understand. Dick feeling irrationally upset (as he freely admits) at the prospect of his car being sold, prior to the cross-country move, stands out from the general equanimity, despite being handled by Kirsten with tender understanding (quite moving in itself); one doesn't wish such difficult moments on others in life, but one does, paradoxically, wish for them in films. Or I do, anyway. (Hence my general strong preference for fiction over documentaries. Way less ghoulish.) 

Anyway, as is often the case, I'm mostly striving to explain why I wasn't bowled over to the degree that many of my peers have been, which makes me sound overly harsh toward a film that I very much like. The flip side of my "complaint" that everyone's so goshdarn wonderful is that they make terrific company—Dick's a real delight, walking the right side of the line between adorably and annoyingly jovial, and it's a pleasure to actually see the cameraperson who'd remained almost entirely offscreen in her directorial debut. (What's the deal with her domestic situation, though? She just casually notes that she lives next door to her two children's apparently different fathers, then says nothing more about it, as if that's not super weird. And I guess Ira Sachs is one of them? Sounds like another movie...) For long stretches, death takes a holiday and we're just watching a thoroughly engaging personal-essay film about coping with dementia's early stages, while the person is still almost entirely lucid; obviously, Johnson's mother, and her absence as a camera subject prior to Alzheimer's taking hold, plays a key spectral role. And then I completely fell for the climactic fakeout(s)—not so much the funeral, but the ambulance ride that precedes it (clever use of the precise date, which can be factual without signifying what we naturally assume that it does) plus the voiceover "recording session" that follows it. Final shot worked precisely as intended; I'm getting weepy again now just thinking about it, in fact. Yet I still feel as if it would have landed even harder had there been more emotional turbulence en route. No doubt I'll be watching this again in the near future, so we'll see whether that changes.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: With rare exceptions, I pay no attention to how titles are capitalized onscreen, sticking to standard style-guide rules. And I would just like to note for the record, because I see this error all the goddamn time, that verbs take a capital letter. Yes, even very short verbs like "is." Dick Johnson Is Dead, not Dick Johnson is Dead. The latter is what appears onscreen in this case, and it is "wrong."