Death and Other Details
Sundance Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
André is an Idiot (2025)
No one in "André is an Idiot" actually quotes the eminent philosopher James T. Kirk and says that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life; but the ethos of Tony Benna's documentary speaks for itself. Fictional and factual art about facing terminal medical diagnoses and imminent reunion with the cosmos isn't exactly thin on the ground, although the universal sympathies of any nonpsychopathic viewer are pulled out freshly painful every time. The success of the art as art comes down to the nature of the person in the frame. In this case that's extrovert ad executive and loving, if mildly madcap, family man André Ricciardi, whose delay in getting a colonoscopy when warning signs appeared at the age of 52 leads to the discovery of a huge Stage IV colorectal cancer tumor, one that had been lining up his destiny for a while.
Mr. Ricciardi is filmed on the day of diagnosis receiving the first official indication of how much trouble he is in, which does briefly make you wonder about when exactly the film crew got involved. Supported by wife, Janice, and daughters, Delilah and Talulah, he faces rounds of first chemotherapy and later radiotherapy over the following three years, musing along the way about whether an enjoyment of drugs and alcohol, plus an aversion to doctors, might have set the stage for all. If not a comedian then certainly a joker, and sometimes under a vast shock of wild hair looking a bit like Alejandro Jodorowsky in "El Topo" for added subculture vibes, Mr. Ricciardi ponders the merits of cryogenic storage, or preserving his genome in an archive, or a full-head transplant onto a younger body. But he's playing to an audience, the one in his house or the one in his head. With the film's final destination already clear before it starts, Mr. Benna spares his subject from saying or acting on that shopworn and dubious media metaphor about Fighting Cancer, in favor of the more prosaically truthful hurts of the daily grind.
There's a brief flare of something spicy in the film concerning Mr. Ricciardi's father Larry, not seen on screen and carefully described as being not the kind of man who would participate in such an exercise. So the actor Tommy Chong appears in Larry's place instead, introduced happily smoking a bong and for a moment looking like he might speak to Mr. Ricciardi in character as the father, something rich in implications. But in fact Mr. Chong speaks as himself, a kindred cultural spirit with his own story of colorectal cancer to tell, although dealt a luckier hand. Mr. Ricciadi never actually curses his own luck, leaving a viewer feeling the weight of their own internal organs to do it for him out of basic compassion. The documentary looks away from the last stages of its subject's physical breakdown, and at one point employs as voiceover an A.I. recreation of Mr. Ricciardi's voice; not quite the sci-fi immortality he was joking about but on the same lines.
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