It is usually seen as a slight in the documentary for its likeness to a public service announcement. However, considering that the late André Ricciardi — star, subject and producer of “André is an Idiot” — was a successful creative director and advertising innovator in San Francisco, he probably wouldn’t mind the comparison. For the most part, Tony Pena’s film is an intimate and offbeat portrait of Ricciardi’s three years living with colon cancer: a frank memoir of treatment and an up-close personal study of an extraordinary character, colored by Ricciardi’s eccentric and stubborn personality. Sense of humor. But it also works as a straightforward message film. “Get the damn colonoscopy,” the title card states before the closing credits roll — not the first time the doc has emphasized this basic necessity.
As you can see, Ricciardi did not do this, and this negligence ultimately cost him his life. The disease is only diagnosed at stage IV, making recovery somewhat unlikely. The title may be his irreverent admission of wrongdoing, though Andre the Fool is not a film about regret or recrimination: if he’s going to die, he thinks he’ll enjoy it as much as he can. Sometimes, as one might expect, this is not much at all, and although Ricciardi’s therapist advises him to make room for “what is tragic and beautiful, as well as comedy,” the film does the same. The A24 production is premiering in competition at Sundance, and should continue to be a significant crowd-pleaser at the doc festival, with particularly strong streaming prospects.
The tone of the proceedings is set by an introductory anecdote that Ricciardi relates directly to the camera, regarding a teenage masturbation incident that left him with splinters in the head of his organs. He says it was by far the biggest mistake he made in life. He stresses that failure to schedule a colonoscopy in a timely manner is no less embarrassing. Even his mother, in a short clip, calls him an “idiot” in the wake of his diagnosis: Such shameful tactics work to such an extent that any similarly uninformed viewer is likely to at least research their options for such action at the moment of the film’s release. Ends.
This kind of banter is rhetorically effective and hugely entertaining, though “Andre the Fool” opens up and breathes once it sets aside this kind of message to scrutinize Ricciardi as a human being rather than a cautionary tale, looking back on life well. And he lived strangely. An early overview of his personal eccentricities and fixations — distilled in a store cupboard that includes a stash hidden as a potential post-apocalyptic currency, or a pair of Kim Kardashian leggings that she won at an online auction and kept for potential cloning purposes — is quickly recontextualized with… Revealing that he is also an unconventional family man, adored by his wife Janice and teenage daughters Tallulah and Delilah. Suddenly, his death no longer seemed such a trivial matter, try as he might to make it so.
Indeed, the film is most enlightening and moving when it settles into an insightful, meticulously detailed examination of everyday domestic life lived under the weight of hastening death. “Death is surprisingly boring,” says Ricciardi, who notes that his numbered days don’t spare him from having to unload the dishwasher every morning, or from both hair loss and weight loss. “How routine my death really seems,” he only half-joked. Janice, long accustomed to his annoying behavior, is a constant pillar of support—sometimes, it seems, swallowing her terror of impending widowhood to enjoy what time they have left together.
“Andre the Cancer is really nice,” she says. Not that it would have been troublesome without cancer, though, with death staring them in the face, they seemed to have found a new, unprecedented, honest way to express their love for each other. For once, Ricciardi was completely honest when he said matter-of-factly that he would already be dead without his wife there. Their marriage began as a favor between friends to help Canadian-born Janice obtain a green card; Nearly 30 years later, they know each other’s virtues, foibles, and insecurities as well as any two people.
However, any time the film veers toward sentimentality, it leans toward depicting the sometimes humiliating absurdities of living with cancer: the inch-long eyelash growth that is a side effect of his medication, or the tiny protective sticker covering his eyelashes. Anus during radiotherapy. “The more cancer bothers me, the merrier it is,” he says, although by his third year of treatment, with his emaciated body and visibly short on time, even he can’t muster much laughter – while Janice also struggles to find the right way to express herself. About herself after the optimism she had insisted on for so long was no longer appropriate.
Pena and his character are unsure from the beginning about the direction this project is headed, though what may seem to some as a bit of heavy-handed goofiness in the film’s early stages is revealed in time as a comedic defense. “Andre the Fool” points out that as life ends, sometimes the right thing to say is what you meant, and sometimes it’s what you don’t mean at all. The truth cuts both ways.