We need to laugh in the face of death. It’s something we all have waiting for us wherever the road happens to stop, and it’s the kind of terrible but inevitable event that humour was designed for. Comedy is many things to many different people, but for me, it’s how we deal with the worst that life has to offer, up to and including its end. It’s a way of coming to terms with what we must come to terms with, and learning to take things on the chin so we can carry on with however much of our lives we have left. It’s the kind of morbid cheek that I have spent most of my own life embracing in one form or another, and it’s why this documentary really stuck a chord with me.
Part documentary, part theatrical fantasy, the film follows the titular Dick Johnson, the father of director Kirsten Johnson, who is a retired psychiatrist living with dementia. In-between candid interviews of the man where he expresses his perspective on life and those around him, Kirsten basically lets her imagination run wild to dramatise a collection of ways that Dick could ultimately die. A freak accident with a falling air conditioner, a chance encounter with a board that has a nail sticking out of it, a heart attack from one too many slices of chocolate cake; it’s surreal stuff, boosted by not only the behind-the-scenes look at all the practical effects and stunt work involved, but also just how game Dick is to be a part of all this.
Death as a concept, as something to be processed by the human mind, finds itself into most of the nooks and crannies of what is shown here, with various testimonials about people’s individual encounters with the ultimate end through their friends and families. But memory isn’t far behind, as Dick’s dementia intermingles with his and Kirsten’s memories of his wife, who died from Alzheimer’s, to proffer an alternate view on someone dying: It doesn’t take death for someone to leave this plane of existence. I lost a family member to Alzheimer’s earlier this year, and that notion of lost memory as a form of elongated farewell to the person you yourself remember, like they've left already but are somehow still here… yeah, that hit pretty hard.
Not that this is a view of death without a bright side to it, though, as beyond the visualisations of possible death, we also get a look at a possible post-death as well. Influenced by the Johnson family’s history with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, we see an incredibly whimsical and effervescent depiction of Heaven, captured with beautiful slow-motion shots and weirdly entertaining dance sequences.
And the connective tissue between all of this is essentially an attempt to preserve life, preserve memory, for when the subject can no longer hold onto either. At its core, documentary filmmaking is the act of containing moments for future posterity, emphasising the composition of life as a series of those moments. It is documentary as slice-of-life, as séance, as fantasy, and as storybook, but most crucially, it is documentary as resurrection. As a life preserved to remind us all that we fear loss only because life gives us so damn much to lose in the first place. The human capacity for memory is inherently flawed, but memories are seldom confined to a single brain. And in the minds of loved ones, in the moments they safeguard in photos and recordings and film, those memories take on a whole new life.
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