André Is An Idiot Is A Complete Tearjerker

ANDRÉ RICCIARDI could be headlining a mockumentary if he could. He has all the chops for it. He is funny, smart, brilliant and irreverent with a sharp and weird mind. He also has an uncanny resemblance with Steve Carell, and much like Michael Scott, the actor’s iconic rendition of a salesman who is as callow as insightful, humour is André’s coping and defence mechanism. It’s his only mechanism. The former advertising veteran could be anything he wants to be, except he cannot. Because he is dying, because André is an idiot.

If André is an Idiot was a fiction film it would have been an inspirational story. The arc is impossible to miss. The camera tracks a terminally ill man. The only way to go is upwards. Here is what can happen: he will brave all odds to emerge victorious. Through his struggle, he is guided and surrounded by his family and their collective endurance distills to a last shot of miraculous victory. Tears are shed and laughter rings in the corridor. If it was fiction, it would be the much-abused heartwarming film that pulls at heartstrings.

Directed by Tony Benna, André is an Idiot is a documentary. By definition, it is without embellishments, yet it is as heartwarming as they come. It is liberally peppered with humour and culminates in a tearjerker. Given the premise, this treatment accounts for a discrepancy, and that is the film.

André Ricciardi is a natural on camera. He is as far from being cagey as possible (the first thing he shares is a childhood incident on how he got blisters on his private part), can take a joke and crack one, and long, matty hair and bulbous eyes lend a sense of excess which aligns with his personality. The second thing we know about him is that he has stage-four colon cancer. He should have done a colonoscopy when he turned 40 (or even later). But he didn’t and was diagnosed with a fatal condition. So he did the next best thing: he called Benna and suggested they document the process. It will be “fun”.

The larger intent is of course to raise awareness. We see André and his best friend Lee coming up with inventive ideas to promote the message about doing an early colposcopy (all flat-out hilarious), the heavy burden of caregiving and the toll it takes on Janice, his wife, and his daughters negotiating time to be with their father. In that sense, the documentary outlines an affecting depiction of an illness and its effect on the people surrounding the patient.

But André is an Idiot is also a fascinating character study that takes nonfiction and uses it not to confront but escape life, and by doing so opens up the possibilities of the form itself. The film tracks his life after the detection. He goes for chemotherapy, looks for ways to donate his body to television and not medicine (his brother’s reaction to it and other idiosyncrasies are priceless) and reasons that his head should be transfixed to another body since that does not have cancer. Benna designs his filmmaking around André's eccentricities, never challenging but almost preserving it. The story about how he married his wife (she wanted a green card) and fell in love is hilarious in itself but the brisk editing, stitching it with their appearance at The Newlywed Game adds to the humour. It aids in putting forth a realised portrait of the man at the centre of it all.

His daughters share how their father has always been weird and different from their kids’ dads. His friend reveals that not too far back he had scheduled a colonoscopy for both of them but André had backed out because it felt too intimate to be doing it with him. In the midst, he goes about going for more chemo sessions, his physical stature becomes more gaunt and his hair keeps thinning.

Benna never loses sight of reality (it is impossible to) but maintains a balance of the tone and the inevitability that fuses into composing such an affirming portrait of life and living that you almost forget this is a film about death. But perhaps it is not. Maybe André is an Idiot is not an obituary or a farewell. Maybe it is about André’s zeal to live, his dedicated attempt to craft a story that he could tell himself where he created and recreated memories (his father famously refused to feature so actor Tommy Chong joined the crew to play the part). And the result is so crushing that you feel privileged to be witnessing it. It is so heartwarming that it makes one hope that this was a chapter of a story and not a fragment of life, that the end credits signified a lesser damning ending, and that André was not an idiot.