A movie about a retired psychiatrist named Richard Johnson who pretends to be a stiff, and there's not one dick joke. Freud is rolling over in his grave.
As made by his daughter, Kirsten Johnson, "Dick Johnson is Dead" is an amusing picture for a documentary about an old widower with worsening dementia moving into a one-bedroom New York apartment with his daughter who films different ways of killing him. The expounding on dying--you know, that everybody's doing it--isn't very profound. The brief overview of the Johnson family's Seventh-day Adventism even less so. The loss of memory is a bit more interesting as it relates to documentary filmmaking, and Kirsten's late mother and Dick's late wife's photography. At one point, Kirsten laments that the only film she made of her mother was when she was well into being affected by Alzheimer's Disease. Although it has been far from always the case, there is a general sense that photographs and motion pictures may outlive the people in them and the memories thereof. Appropriately, then, the documentary is made in the reflexive mode, exposing the filmmaking process, including the staging of Dick's death scenes, and including the filmmaker as a heard and seen presence in the picture.
Apt as much of that is, what really sells "Dick Johnson is Dead" is the charm of its eponymous would-be corpse. This guy has life figured out. Eat chocolate cake and ice cream and crack jokes with friends and family, don't let stuff bother you too much, and if you're not sure what to do, take a nap or watch TV. The movie may get carried away with some of the heavenly imagery and interludes with cutouts and at other times not seem to be going much of anywhere, but it's worth sticking around for that wisdom from the demented dead man.
