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‘André Is an Idiot’ Review: Jokes, Tears and Colonoscopy Reminders in the Cancer Diary of a Born Eccentric
Tony Benna's Sundance-premiered 'André is an Idiot' irreverently chronicles the last years in the life of advertising creative André Ricciardi.
This kind of banter is both rhetorically effective and archly amusing, though “André is an Idiot” opens up and breathes once it sets aside that strain of messaging to scrutinize Ricciardi as a human being rather than a cautionary tale, looking back over a life well and oddly lived. Any time the film swings toward the sentimental, however, it lurches back toward a depiction of the sometimes humiliating absurdities of living with cancer: the inch-long eyelash growth that is a side effect of his medication, or the small protective sticker that covers his anus during radiation therapy. “The more the cancer fucks me up, the funnier it should be,” he says, though by his third year of treatment, with his body emaciated and his time plainly short, even he can’t muster up much of laugh — while Janice, too, struggles to find the right way to express herself after her long-insistent optimism no longer feels appropriate.
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