As a family medicine doctor, I couldn’t quite get out of my own way while watching this film. I kept fixating on the idea of consent, on how much Dick had truly consented to this project and how much it was ethical and fair to him to keep being “subjected” to the project as his disease progressed. I kept asking myself, “should the filming have kept going even as Dick was entering a phase where he may not have understood the consent he had given in the beginning?” I can tell that Kirsten Johnson was thinking a lot about those questions too, as she sometimes puts those questions in the foreground of her film.
I can’t fully resolve these ethical questions, but it helps a lot that we can see Kirsten’s love for her Dad. The film ultimately seems to become an act of love. The love is seen in the way Kirsten speaks to and cares for her father, but also in the way she shapes this footage into a thoughtful document – a filmic record of a life brimming with vitality and generosity even at the door of death.
