‘André Is an Idiot’ Review: Crowdpleasing Sundance Documentary Winner

Were I to ask you to think of your ideal 88-minute PSA for colonoscopies, chances are you would have only two answers: Either “Huh?!?” or “That time Katie Couric got a colonoscopy on Today.”

Thanks to Tony Benna’s new documentary, André Is an Idiot, there’s now a viable third possibility.

Funny, sad and uncomfortable in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement and a documentary memento mori — not always pleasant to watch, but far more pleasant to watch than the subject matter would suggest, since you wouldn’t normally think “watching a sarcastic guy die” and “Sundance audience award winner” go hand-in-hand.

The “André” in question is André Ricciardi, a San Francisco man who begins the documentary by recounting an unfortunate story of teenage masturbation that left him with splinters in his penis.

“Until now, that was probably the greatest mistake I’ve made,” he says.

That honor has now been snatched by André’s failure to get a colonoscopy. Maintaining a “No Cops, No Docs” policy, André puts off the procedure even when invited by his best friend Lee to get a “couples colonoscopy.” When he finally tries to get a colonoscopy … it’s too late and he’s told he has stage four colon cancer that has made it to his liver.

Facing death, the self-described “idiot” decides to make a documentary about his own idiocy, told with the irreverence and distracted obsessions that mark his general worldview. He doesn’t have an exact purpose for this new project, completed with many of the colleagues he worked with in his career in advertising, other than to learn from the once-in-a-lifetime experience. What starts as an exercise in boredom and bucket-list eccentricity becomes introspective in ways that aren’t surprising, but hit home emotionally, when he isn’t advancing the project of urging people to avoid his idiocy.

Beyond André, fast-talking and acerbic, the documentary is well-populated by the characters in André’s life, starting with wife Janice, a Canadian who began as his green card bride, but … well, it’s a better story the way they tell it. He has two teenage daughters, who are accustomed to their father’s oddities, but may not be prepared for this serious twist in his life. He has the aforementioned best friend Lee, with whom he vows to maintain their perpetual irreverence, regardless of where this health journey takes him. At various points, we meet his skeptical brother, several co-workers, a wise therapist and, in one wonderful sequence, his father, though not in a way I would deign to spoil.

Benna and the crew, who are patiently abetting André at every turn, find smart ways to capture the passing of time; the normal course of cancer-related events (chemo, doctors appointments, etc.); André’s particular curiosities or obsessions, like a website dedicated to helping people strategize and capture their last words; and both his normal and more oddball preoccupations with what’s occurring and what will happen after after he dies. There are playful time-passing montages and stop-motion animation interludes and attempts at whimsy, even as maintaining humor becomes more difficult.

There’s the text and then there’s the dark undercurrent beneath the text.

André is consistently “the text” and you can pay close attention to the moment at which you can no longer question the physical toll the cancer is taking on him, the moment at which the emotion cracking through his voice goes from the exception to the rule. But more than that, you have to watch what happens to the documentary’s ensemble, whether it’s the one daughter whose on-camera involvement simply ceases, the fun and playful adventures with Lee that become less and less frequent, or Janice’s growing and advancing exhaustion. The toll of caretaking starts as a joke, becomes a thing André admits to candidly, and then becomes a boulder that she’s carrying at every moment — with added weight as viewers think back to their unorthodox origins as a couple and reflect on an unlikely, beautiful love story.

For a while, André approaches the documentary as almost self-portraiture. Along the way, he either relinquishes control or decides that the portrait he wants is one of relinquishing control, which is powerful in its own way.

Because André is an Idiot premiered at Sundance days after the debut of the HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, there are interesting comparisons; that doc is dedicated to Paul Reubens attempting to assist in the crafting of a biographical/autobiographical documentary. In that filming process, Reubens knew he was undergoing cancer treatments, the filmmakers apparently did not, and audiences watching the completed film come equipped with the awareness of Reubens’ death in 2023. It’s two different approaches to self-definition and morality delivered by two different types of man-children, which end up being unexpected complementary texts.

The Reubens documentary won’t have to fight for an audience. Multiple generations know and love Pee-wee Herman and Reubens and will watch as the last word on a very public life.

In André’s case, this is the very public last word on a journey everybody eventually takes, but most people take in private. For some viewers, the personal experience will make André Is an Idiot unwatchable; for others, the universality will make it poignantly cathartic. André admits this isn’t a commercial for death or how to die, just the version of the experience he wants to present. And if that, in the process, encourages some people to not be idiots and get colonoscopies, that’s a pretty big legacy for any one, wacky ad man to leave.