In his Sundance Audience Award-winning film, director Tony Benna follows his friend André Ricciardi from cancer diagnosis to treatment as he ponders mortality, family, and at least one bad choice.
Funny, sad, and uncomfortable in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement and a memento mori documentary—not always pleasant to watch, but far more pleasant to watch than the subject matter suggests, since you wouldn’t normally think that “watching a snarky guy die” and “Sundance Audience Award winner” go hand in hand.
Director: Tony Benna
Star: André Ricciardi
The “André” in question is André Ricciardi, a San Francisco man who begins the documentary by recounting an unfortunate tale of teenage masturbation that left him with splinters in his penis.
“So far, that was probably the biggest mistake I’ve ever made,” he says.
That honor has now been robbed from him by André’s failure to get a colonoscopy. Maintaining a “no cops, no doctors” policy, André puts off the procedure even when his best friend Lee invites him to get a “couples colonoscopy.” When he finally tries to get a colonoscopy… it’s too late and he’s told he has stage four colon cancer that has reached his liver.
Facing death, the self-described “idiot” decides to make a documentary about his own idiocy, told with the irreverence and absent-minded obsessions that mark his general worldview. He has no exact purpose for this new project, made with many of the colleagues he worked with in his career in advertising, beyond learning from the once-in-a-lifetime experience. What begins as an exercise in boredom and bucket-list eccentricity becomes introspective in ways that aren’t surprising, but emotionally impactful, when he’s not furthering the project of urging people to shun their idiocy.
Beyond André, who is fast-talking and acerbic, the documentary is well-populated by the characters in André’s life, starting with his wife Janice, a Canadian who started out as his green-card girlfriend, but… well, it’s a better story the way it’s told. He has two teenage daughters, who are used to their father’s oddities but may not be ready for this serious turn in his life. He has the aforementioned best friend Lee, with whom he vows to maintain his perpetual irreverence, regardless of where this health journey takes him. At various points, we meet his skeptical brother, various coworkers, a wise therapist, and, in one wonderful sequence, his father, though not in a way I would deign to spoil.
Benna and the crew, who patiently assist André throughout, find clever ways to capture the passage of time; the normal course of cancer-related events (chemotherapy, doctor appointments, etc.); André’s particular curiosities or obsessions, like a website dedicated to helping people strategize and capture their last words; and his normal and stranger concerns about what’s going on and what will happen after he dies. There are playful montages that pass the time and interludes of stop-motion animation and attempts at whimsy, even when maintaining humor becomes more difficult.
André is constantly “the text,” and you can pay close attention to the moment when you can no longer question the physical toll cancer is taking on him, the moment when the emotion that breaks through his voice goes from being the exception to the rule. But more than that, you have to watch what happens to the cast of the documentary, whether it’s the daughter whose on-camera involvement simply ceases, the fun, playful adventures with Lee that become less and less frequent, or Janice’s growing, progressive exhaustion. The Cost of Caring for a Person starts out as a joke, becomes something André candidly admits, and then becomes a stone he carries on his shoulders throughout, with added weight as viewers are reminded of their unorthodox origins as a couple and reflect on a beautiful and unlikely love story.
For a while, André approaches the documentary almost as a self-portrait. Along the way, he either relinquishes control or decides that the portrait he wants is one of a relinquishing of control, which is powerful in its own way.
Since André is an Idiot premiered at Sundance days after the debut of the HBO documentary Pee-wee as Him, there are interesting comparisons; that documentary is dedicated to Paul Reubens, who is attempting to assist in the making of a biographical/autobiographical documentary. In that filming process, Reubens knew he was undergoing cancer treatments, the filmmakers apparently didn’t, and audiences who see the finished film come equipped with a sense of humor.
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