Dick Johnson Is Dead

Netflix | Release Date (Streaming): October 2, 2020

7.6	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 44 Ratings

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GBBQOct 8, 2020

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Seeing this as a 'Must See' on Metacritic meant I was going to watch this as soon as possible. I did so last night and, well, maybe the hype train killed it for me but I just wasn't moved by it. Its a nice tribute and I'm sure it was cathartic for the director but the whole thing felt false, we're led to believe on a couple of occasions that Dick Johnson has indeed died when the truth is he's still alive as I write this. That's great and maybe we should all get a chance to be mourned while we are still alive to really understand how our friends and family feel. But the fact is it never felt like this was a guy who was dying, he hadn't declined mentally or physically, he looked far from frail, didn't seem to have any regrets and had made peace. That might make for reassuring viewing but also made it hard to really connect emotionally.

I'm sure its a counter statement to our morbid fascination with death through podcasts and documentaries but by being too light in tone it just failed to hook me.… Expand

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Brent_MarchantApr 13, 2021

I must be missing something here, because I just don't get the hype behind director Kirsten Johnson's documentary about the last years of the life of her father, Dick, an elderly Seattle psychiatrist besieged by the onset of dementia. ItsI must be missing something here, because I just don't get the hype behind director Kirsten Johnson's documentary about the last years of the life of her father, Dick, an elderly Seattle psychiatrist besieged by the onset of dementia. Its eclectic mix of content doesn't gel well, despite some of the material being exceedingly well done. It comes across mostly as an often-endearing, loving tribute, though it's frequently weighed down by far too much extraneous, incidental and, at times, repetitive material. Then there are the picture's fictional segments in which the director presents comically gruesome stagings of her father's demise (a la the macabre suicide sequences from Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude" (1971)) as a means of coping with Dick's impending passage (most of which aren't especially inventive or funny). Taken together, this amalgamation of material just doesn't mesh and leaves viewers with a confusing portrait of what the filmmaker was attempting to accomplish. Perhaps recutting the footage would have helped, but, as it stands now, this one doesn't come through as it should.… Expand

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