André Is an Idiot

The title is what André Ricciardi calls himself for skipping the colonoscopy that would have caught his cancer while it was still catchable. By the time the film starts, it’s too late, and André, a loud advertising guy, decides to spend the time he has left pointing a camera at his own dying. That could be grim or self-indulgent. It’s neither.

André Is an Idiot is funny in the way people are funny at their own expense, and it lands its one practical point, get the screening, without ever turning into a public service announcement. What sticks is the honesty about fear. He’s scared, his family is wrecked, and nobody pretends otherwise. It’s a documentary about death that’s oddly great company, which is the highest thing you can say about it.

Advertising creative Andre Ricciardi, who never got a colonoscopy, is dying of terminal colon cancer and asks a friend to film his final chapter as a comedy. A darkly funny, Sundance-winning meditation on learning to die happily.