Kristen Johnson's funny, moving documentary about the last years of her father's life - with many surprises

 Kristen Johnson's funny, original, and moving documentary about the last years of her father's life, Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020, Netflix) has many surprises and somehow manages to avoid the lachrymose sensibility that pervades many such projects. This one, in the direct line of Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, is part of an emerging genre that we might call auto-film, much like the movement toward auto fiction (from Proust to Knausgaard) that has become a dominant trend in literary fiction. KJ's film, made with the complete cooperation of her dad, a successful Seattle-based psychiatrist, widowed for some time (his wife died of Alzheimer's complications) is, as the documentary opens, feeling the first painful signs of the onset of dementia, and his daughter, of whom he's proud, asks if he'd be willing to be the subject of this project (in one of the many touching moments in this film, KJ shows the only video she has of her mother's last years, and she regrets she had so little). All viewers will be struck by how kind, pleasant, and intelligent Dick Johnson is - a well-adjusted man, w/ friends and with patients who seem to care deeply for him. This film is the antithesis of a "Mommy Dearest" project; the family is well-adjusted, comfortably established but by no means wealthy, loving, and caring - what a surprise! The arc of the story entails director KJ helping Dick J relinquish his profession, his independence, and his beautiful Seattle house and re-locate to NYC where he is sharing quarters with his daughter (and his, thankfully, near his beloved grandchildren). He never resists her plan, realizing it's for the best for all, but there's much sorrow and struggle as he gives up the life he knows. What keeps the film buoyant are the many comic "pranks" that KJ creates and stages, all of which dramatize Dick J's calamitous death, e.g., a window AC falls on his head as he walks down a NYC street, or a construction worker carrying a beam turns thoughtlessly and the beam smacks Dick to the ground. But he always "rises," to the point that we become inured to his death - though KJ has some surprises for us right up to the end of this film, an ending that is powerful and a beautiful summary of her father's life and of her art.