‘André Is an Idiot’ Review: Jokes, Tears and Colonoscopy Reminders in the Cancer Diary of a Born Eccentric
It’s usually seen as a slight on a documentary to liken it to a public service announcement. However, given that the late André Ricciardi — star, subject and producer of “André is an Idiot” — was a successful and innovative advertising creative director in San Francisco, he probably wouldn’t mind the comparison. For the most part, Tony Benna’s film is an intimate, offbeat portrait of the three years that Ricciardi spent living with colonic cancer: both a candid treatment diary and a close-up character study of an unusual personality, colored by Ricciardi’s own peculiar and unyielding sense of humor. But it also functions as a straightforward message movie. “Get yourself a fucking colonoscopy,” states a title card before the closing credits roll — not the first time the doc underlines that basic imperative.
Ricciardi, you see, did not, and this negligence ultimately cost him his life. The disease was only diagnosed at stage four, leaving remission more or less out of the question. The title may be his own characteristically irreverent admission of error, though “André is an Idiot” is not a film of regrets or recriminations: If he’s going to die, he reckons, he’s going to enjoy dying as much as he possibly can. Sometimes, as one might expect, that’s not very much at all, though as Ricciardi’s therapist advises him to make space for “the tragic and beautiful, as well as the comic,” the film does the same. An A24 production premiering in competition at Sundance, it should continue to be a significant docfest crowdpleaser, with especially strong streaming prospects.
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The tone for proceedings is set by an introductory anecdote that Ricciardi relates directly to camera, concerning a teenage masturbation mishap that left him with splinters in the head of his member. Until now, he says, that was his biggest mistake in life; failing to book a timely colonoscopy, he stresses, is a bigger one, and no less embarrassing. Even his mother, in a brief clip, brands him an “idiot” in the wake of his diagnosis: Such shaming tactics work to the extent that any similarly uninformed viewer is likely to at least look up their options for the procedure the moment the film ends.
This kind of banter is both rhetorically effective and archly amusing, though “André is an Idiot” opens up and breathes once it sets aside that strain of messaging to scrutinize Ricciardi as a human being rather than a cautionary tale, looking back over a life well and oddly lived. An early overview of his personal eccentricities and fixations — distilled in a store cupboard that includes a hash stash reserved as potential post-apocalyptic currency, or a pair of Kim Kardashian’s leggings won in an online auction and kept for potential cloning purposes — is swiftly recontextualized with the revelation that he’s also an unconventional family man, doted on by his wife Janice and his teenage daughters Tallula and Delilah. Suddenly, his dying doesn’t seem like such a jape, try as he might to make it one.
Indeed, the film is most enlightening and affecting when it settles into a perceptive, finely detailed examination of everyday domesticity lived under the weight of rushing mortality. “Dying is surprisingly boring,” observes Ricciardi, as he notes that his numbered days don’t exempt him from having to unload the dishwasher every morning, or as he becomes dully accustomed to hair loss and weight loss alike. “How routine my death feels already,” he only half-jokes. Janice, long accustomed to his prankish behavior, is a steady pillar of support — sometimes, it seems, swallowing her terror of impending widowhood to enjoy what time they have left together.
“Cancer André is really nice,” she says. Not that he was unpleasant without cancer, one assumes, though as death stares them in the face, it seems they find a new, unprecedentedly sincere way of communicating their love for each other. For once, Ricciardi is wholly straight-faced as he states matter-of-factly that he’d be dead already without his wife there. Their marriage began as a favor between friends, to assist Canadian-born Janice with a green card; nearly 30 years on, they know each other’s virtues and foibles and insecurities about as well as any two people can.
Any time the film swings toward the sentimental, however, it lurches back toward a depiction of the sometimes humiliating absurdities of living with cancer: the inch-long eyelash growth that is a side effect of his medication, or the small protective sticker that covers his anus during radiation therapy. “The more the cancer fucks me up, the funnier it should be,” he says, though by his third year of treatment, with his body emaciated and his time plainly short, even he can’t muster up much of laugh — while Janice, too, struggles to find the right way to express herself after her long-insistent optimism no longer feels appropriate.
Benna and his subject make no bones from the start about where this project is headed, though what might strike some as a slightly strenuous zaniness in the early stages of the film is revealed in time as a comic defense. “André is an Idiot” counsels that, as life runs out, sometimes the right thing to say is what you mean, and sometimes it’s what you absolutely don’t. The truth cuts through either way.
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