Who Knew: I Knew André Was an Idiot, and Soon, You Will Too

‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market.

A man, diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, made a hilarious, profound rocketship of a movie about it, and I’m inviting you to come watch it with me at the New Canaan Playhouse on April 18th.

André is an Idiot is the best movie about death I’ve ever seen. Not just me; pretty much anyone who sees it. It won the Audience Award at Sundance. It’s a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Per Esquire, “The Best Comedy of the Year is a Documentary About Death.” Produced by New Canaan local Tory Tunnell and her company, Safehouse Pictures, directed by André’s longtime friend Tony Benna, it’s absolutely not what you’d expect from a documentary about cancer. This tracks, because André was absolutely not what you’d expect from a human person. 

I know this because André and I were friends for more than 20 years. 

There are people for whom flying their freak flag requires discomfort and courage, and people whose entire existence glitters and explodes with freak flag fibers. More than anyone I’ve ever known, André was the latter. When we worked together in the louche, freewheeling days of early-aughts San Francisco advertising, André didn’t have to exert any effort in coming up with wild ideas. He already existed on a cosmic plane that was totally incompatible with mundanity. 

 

Before I knew my husband Andrew, even, we both knew André – San Francisco was small-worldy like that. When, on one of our early dates, Andrew mentioned André admiringly, I took it as a good omen. People with good taste love André. Together, Andrew and André sold a content series to eBay that involved them traveling the country together for a year in an Airstream trailer. The project was sidelined by the 2008 financial crisis, and honestly, perhaps this was for the best. 

When André’s impossibly grim diagnosis of stage IV colon cancer came in 2020, almost a year to the day after he had declined the invitation from his best friend Lee to go get “couples’ colonoscopies” together, André turned his life’s worst news into a final creative challenge: to make a movie about himself dying. 

Funny, sad, and deeply human in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement (get a colonoscopy!) and a documentary memento mori. It’s not always cozy to watch; this ain’t no after-school special. You will find yourself adoring André, his wife Janice, and their daughters, and you will want to shepherd them off the screen to a safe place and spare them the coming onslaught of pain. But death spares nobody; it robs every house. André and director Benna tackle that certainty with clear-eyed honesty, and they refuse to let it get maudlin. Case in point: a puppet gets radiation. On its butt. 

As a society, we have a fraught relationship with death. We don’t even manage to linguistically square up to it most of the time, preferring polite, effete euphemisms like “she passed away” or “he lost his battle”. All the whispering and sidestepping leave us a little underprepared to face the inevitable when it happens to us, and to people we love. They are here one day, and the next day, they aren’t. 

To watch this movie is to confront death without euphemisms. It should be unbearable to see someone fade away onscreen with whom I shared countless rounds of Miller High Life in wharfside dive bars when we were young and ridiculous. It isn’t, though. It’s honest and unsparing, but it also demystified his illness for me in a way that a small talk phone conversation wouldn’t have done.

One of the things I appreciate most is seeing Janice, André’s wife, support his project, keep their family’s daily lives afloat, and process her own raw grief in real time. Janice is a force of nature. She’d once been André’s bartender. Originally from Canada, she married him for a green card, not too long before I met them. After their marriage, they went on The Newlywed Game, won it, and only then did they fall in love for the long haul and have kids. See what I mean? Joyfully, wildly unorthodox. No automatic pilot. 

The last time I saw André, I had flown home to scatter my mom’s ashes in the San Francisco Bay. Andrew and I stuck around for a couple of extra days, and on a sunny Monday afternoon, we found ourselves wandering around outside the Palace of the Legion of Honor. André didn’t know we were in town, but he somehow came flying by in a gray VW, windows open, his hair in a ponytail. He shouted “Mulloy!” — my maiden name — as if finding us there were the most natural thing in the world. I ran up to his car and launched into the whole story: why we were there, my mom, the cannabis gummies we’d just legally purchased for the first time (hence the wandering) and did he and Janice want to get a drink? I went on for four solid minutes. He let me. Then, smiling, he gestured toward his speakers.

“You’re on a conference call right now.”

His whole work team had been listening the entire time.

“Hi!” they chimed in. “Sorry about your mom.”

For moviegoers on April 18th, there are delightful surprises in store (Tommy Chong! Colon radiology etiquette!), and there’s plenty of cursing, so bring your clutching pearls if that’s not your scene. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with one of André’s family members and Tory Tunnell that I will (clumsily) moderate. We’ll talk about how a movie like this gets made, how a person like André comes to exist, and what it’s been like for Tory and her team to relentlessly champion André is an Idiot for film festivals and wide release. The short answer is that André’s story deserves it. The long answer is worth showing up to hear.

Some people move through the world, leaving it permanently altered. The decent thing, maybe the only thing, is to pay attention while they’re here, and bear witness after they’re gone.

André Is an Idiot does both.

I’ll see you on Saturday, April 18th, at 7 PM, at the Playhouse.
You can watch the full trailer here.