Kirsten Johnson and her father, Dick. Photo: Sacha Maric / Netflix Even in a mask, Kirsten Johnson glows like a lighthouse. She walks like one, too: tall and broad-shouldered, her attention sweeping around like a searchlight. “I think of images as relationships, right?” the director says as we wander through Washington Square Park. For 30 years, she has been making films, and that mode doesn’t just switch off. “There’s a thing of the physical proximity you need in order to film something.
When Dick Johnson, a now-retired Seattle psychiatrist and verified pistol, started double-booking appointments and drove through a construction zone, his daughter asked him to leave the West Coast and move in with her and her two children in New York — to make a movie about his death done as a Monty Python–style gag. “The idea was I’m going to kill him over and over,” she says. He was delighted: On film, at least, he can resurrect.
After decades of Johnson’s restrained documentary work, Dick Johnson Is Dead is unabashedly stunty, sometimes blurring the line between what’s true and what’s not. The result is a little Harold and Maude, a little Still Alice, and a little terrifying. The absence of pity can sometimes be startling, especially when you see the documentarian’s dispassion trained on a tottering old man. “Humor is really tricky,” says Johnson. “It’s a little mean.
A few weeks ago, Johnson dreamed she was in a house and discovered an extra room. How surprising! How delightful! But this time, doorways kept opening into different spaces. Open one door, and it’s the ocean. Open the next, a desert. In each room, she kept finding her father. In one of them, he was in a room that seemed bare and empty. “Dad,” she remembers asking him, “what are you doing in this room? You’re missing all your things.
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