Tony Benna’s André Is an Idiot is just long enough to qualify as a feature film rather than an extended public service announcement, but make no mistake, it’s still a public service announcement. The message is conveyed loud and clear, in plain English right as the credits roll for extra emphasis: “Get A Fucking Colonoscopy.” Of course, the documentary’s subject, André Ricciardi, is well aware that that message would’ve meant less coming from some anonymous, unrelatable nerd in a white coat, or some suit working for Health and Human Services. Faced with a death sentence of a diagnosis, and armed with a sardonic humor, Ricciardi makes for a perfect emissary for the film’s ultimate call to action.
Messaging was the man’s business. Ricciardi was a grungy, wild-haired ad creative partly responsible for some extremely well-known advertising campaigns over the last two decades. We’re introduced to him in the opening minutes of André Is an Idiot with a story about the time he got splinters in his penis during a masturbation mishap when he was a teenager. He got married on a whim to help a casual Canadian acquaintance, Janice, secure a green card, only to be married to her until the day he died in 2023. Ricciardi is nothing if not a born storyteller. And as such, there’s nothing he could say—to anyone, including his two daughters—that can better convey the mistake of not taking your health seriously than seeing the effects of his own negligence up close, personal, and injected with a sense of indomitable gallows humor.
Indeed, Ricciardi’s lesson is learned within the first 10 minutes of the documentary. He gets the diagnosis that brings his life to a screeching halt right up front. After putting it off for years thanks to a staunch policy of “no cops, no doctors,” a friend finally finagles him into getting his first colonoscopy in his early 50s, only to find out he’s too late: Not only does he have colon cancer, but it’s stage four. At that point, even if a patient receives the best oncological care on the planet, chances are good their remaining years can most likely be counted on one hand.
From there, the film could easily have settled into a catalog of morose contemplations about the meaning of a short-lived life and how a body’s betrayal brings a man down. But Ricciardi is endlessly curious and irreverent about his condition. What the film actually becomes is a consistently hilarious look at the ridiculousness of living with cancer, the good and bad days, and what kind of defenses a person has to raise to get through it while still smiling.
Andre’s defense mechanism very often consists of him finding bizzarro cosmic significance in his situation. From his viewpoint, talking about the precautions that doctors take when dealing with chemotherapy drugs and having to figure out what to do with your stiff corpse after you’re gone are absurdly funny conversations to have, and the film helps its audience get in that mindset by bolstering Ricciardi’s jokes with Anomalisa-like stop-motion animation.
Ricciardi is so bracingly irreverent that he’ll readily elicit your laughter, even while acknowledging the severity of his situation. It helps that, underneath his irreverence, and holding the entire film aloft, is his sincere adoration for the act of drawing breath. Ricciardi’s treatment does eventually go from diagnostic to palliative, and the film can’t help but shift toward the melancholic. But Ricciardi’s cruel decline doesn’t completely sous his relationship to his mortality—only, perhaps, slightly recontextualizes it. As the film comes to a close, it becomes easy to distinguish his genuine bravery from him putting on a brave face.
It’s strange to call a film about man staring down death a good time, but André Is an Idiot is designed to be just that—to have Ricciardi’s humor disarm others like him who might be avoiding preventative care for whatever reason. And that humor may very well end up saving lives if it spurs others to make a doctor’s appointment after the credits roll. Laughter may be the best medicine, but even for that prescription, please consult your doctor.
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