A bold, hilarious, and deeply human documentary that finds humor in the face of death
André Is an Idiot is unlike anything you would expect, blending comedy and mortality into a deeply personal and surprisingly uplifting documentary experience.
André is an idiot. Technically, André is a f*&king idiot according to his mother. That is what she said when he told her he had colon cancer. The worst kind there is...stage four, meaning it had metastasized to other parts of his body, specifically his lungs and his liver. It was a death sentence. André knew it. His wife, Janice, knew it. Now we all know it because, with the help of director Tony Benna, André spent the final three and a half years of his life making a comedy documentary about dying. Yes, you heard that correctly, a COMEDY. ABOUT DYING.
The film opens with André telling the story about when he spent the night at his grandparents' house at the age of 13. He describes the situation where he was masturbating in their bathroom, and, thinking the underside of the counter was as smooth as the Formica top and would feel good, he rubbed his penis on it and was instead left with a penis full of splinters from the unfinished wood. As he explains, up until the age of 50, that was the biggest mistake he had made in his life. And with that, the film is off and running.
For the next 88 minutes, André philosophizes about life, humor, parenthood, and dying. We watch as he cleans out his "junket closet" only to find a pair of Kim Kardashian's pleather pants, which he claims he got because pleather can't be washed and he figured he would one day scrape her DNA off the pants and clone her (which isn't as creepy or as stalkerish as it sounds). He then digresses into cryogenically freezing himself, or his head at least, and using his DNA to be cloned later. And that is only the tip of the iceberg of his outlandish ideas (a majority of which didn't make it into the film).
André, by his wife's, Janice's, admission, is a stoic human being. He is also hilariously funny and finds the humor in everything, even stage 4 colon cancer. He has never been conventional and doesn't see any reason to begin now. Even his marriage wasn't conventional, but it seems to work, and his relationship with his daughters is more "cerebral" than affectionate; again, it seems to work. Even André's own father, who is incredibly private - in direct contrast to André - admits he "would rather go through chemo" than be in this film (Tommy Chong steps in to play André's Dad to even more hilarity).
Director Tony Benna has the unenviable task of taking all of André's frenetic rants and focusing them into something coherent and sensible. Luckily, he does a fantastic job of doing so for the most part. He captures many of André's taped "confessions", André's outings with his best friend Lee, André in the car with Janice, driving to doctors' appointments, etc., and blends them all beautifully to offer a complete story of André and his cancer journey. In fact, the only part of Tony's directing I didn't care for was the moments that we are looking up at André from the toilet bowl or the bottom of a glass of water with MiraLAX residue in it.
Throughout the film, we learn several valuable lessons (and some not so valuable ones). Perhaps the most valuable ones are the act of being selfless in order to allow our loved ones grieve, the shared common thread that we may or may not fear death but that we are afraid for our loved ones who remain once we pass, and the art of looking at André's story as he wasn't dying for three years but that he really LIVED for those last three years.
Grade: A-
