“It’s not a documentary about a wrestler. It’s a documentary about a giant guy who knows he’s going to die.”
That’s how Bill Simmons, Andre the Giant executive producer, described his first project with HBO films earlier this week.
It’s an incredible and deeply sad premise, one that the film takes its time establishing — and doesn’t always remain faithful to.
But Andre the Giant, which made its worldwide debut on Tuesday night, still delivers a powerful retrospective of the life of Andre Roussimoff, the professional wrestler whose persona towered over and outweighed those who had come before him, and a crossover superstar who helped build the stage that the likes of Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, and The Rock, would go on to occupy.
In Andre the Giant, filmmaker Jason Hehir is tasked with fitting the larger-than-life story of one of the most recognizable and revered performers of the 20th century into an hour and a half of screen time.
Hehir traces Andre’s childhood roots in rural France and chronicles his rise through the ranks of pro wrestling, where he’s credited with ushering the pastime from the “rasslin’” era to today’s world of “sports entertainment.” But for the most part it’s the moments the documentary spends outside of the ring that have the most lasting effect on the viewer.
Here are some takeaways from the new HBO documentary, Andre the Giant:
• As expected, much is made of the freakshow aspect of Andre and the fans around the world that flocked to see this seemingly inhuman being in person. Andre himself seemed to embrace that and in an archival interview he talks about how “everybody wants to see a giant.” Wrestling gave Andre a purpose and he felt a sort of responsibility to put his size and charisma to work.
But when the film traces his history you can’t help but question the interests of the wrestling promoters determined to build a business off of his back.
We see incredible footage of a slim Andre in the earliest days of his career in France and later Quebec, wrestling as “Jean Ferre,” a woodsman/lumberjack character.
Andre’s career takes off when he meets Vince McMahon Sr., who started the promotion his son – and current WWE boss – would turn into a global enterprise thanks in large part to his mammoth attraction.
But listening to McMahon recall what his old man saw in Andre, it no longer feels like he’s talking about a person. Andre becomes a commodity, a walking bank machine.
After getting the Giant under contract, McMahon Sr. would lease Andre to other regional promotions around the United States — for a fee — and essentially pimp out his newest star.
Andre was a good soldier. He would “sell” (making his small-town opponents look good and execute their moves on him in the ring), but it was always clear that he was ultimately going to win every match.
Yes, Andre profited, too, and we’re led to believe that the trials of travelling in the ’70s and ’80s while standing 7-foot-4 and over 350 pounds (he was billed as a 500-pound man) are worth the fame and fortune. But there’s a sleaziness to the promoters capitalizing on Andre’s freakish attributes that is hard to shake as the doc continues on — particularly since we aren’t offered any insight from Andre, who passed away in 1993.
In many ways Andre the Giant is a tale of exploitation that you wish could have been told by the person himself.
• There are an abundance of remarkably corny lines and phrases to describe Andre throughout the film. At the very beginning we’re told that he was the “living manifestation of our childhood dreams.”
Applied to just about anybody else, lines like those would induce heavy eye-rolling. But if there was ever a subject apt for larger-than-life maxims, it was Andre the Giant.
• A big part of Andre’s significance was that he was among the first pro wrestlers to truly crossover and become a part of the mainstream popular culture.
The film does a great job of using archival clips to demonstrate this, showing Andre cameos on The Six Million Dollar Man, where he played a convincing Sasquatch, and late-night appearances with Dave Letterman.
A healthy portion of the film is dedicated to his performance in The Princess Bride, with cast members like Robin Wright, Billy Crystal, and Carey Elwes recalling, among other things, the difficulties he felt during the shoot due to a bad back that would limit his wrestling ability greatly in later years, forcing him to wrestle with one hand on the rope for support during entire matches.
• With that Simmons quote at the top of this piece in mind, I wanted to dive so much deeper into that aspect of Andre’s life than the doc provided.
The straightforward narrative means it’s not until halfway through the documentary that we learn details of Andre’s gigantism. While a revelation like that partway through a story could offer a Staircase-like twist (The Staircase is a must-see true crime doc), that alters the way the rest of the story is viewed.
There’s an interview with Andre’s doctor, who, after Andre had already become a star, first treated him for a broken ankle and identified the acromegaly (“gigantism”) that had clearly explained Andre’s size and sudden growth spurt as a teenager in France.
The doctor helped to identity not a cure, but at least a way to limit future effects — which often lead to the heart failure that ultimately cost Andre his life. But Andre refused any treatment.
We later learn that Andre’s disease is curable. But he refuses treatment because, we’re told, he didn’t want to have to put his career on hold.
Andre lived his final years knowing that he wouldn’t live for very long and the documentary attempts to illustrate the psychological effects that had on him, but it’s an angle that could have been explored deeper.
• The film tells Andre’s story chronologically, taking brief side trips to tackle topics like early nicknames, his relationship with women, and, yes, farting (“When he passed gas it was an event,” McMahon tells us.)
It also takes breaks to dive into some of the mythology behind Andre, spending a fair bit of time on his legendary drinking habits. Ric Flair tells us that he saw Andre drink 106 beers in one sitting. Rob Reiner, director of The Princess Bride tells us about the time Andre drank 20 bottles of liquor during one day on the film’s set. And so on, and so forth.
• For wrestling fans, one of the more interesting parts is when Hogan breaks down how he and Andre went about planning their legendary Wrestlemania 3 bout in Pontiac, Mich.
Hogan, one of the more frequent voices heard in the doc, does a great job of providing the viewer a glimpse at the mechanisms of orchestrating a wrestling match — the choreography that takes place before, the in-ring chatter and in-the-moment decisions made as we learn that it was Andre’s call to have Hogan body slam him. It’s become one of if not the most enduring images in wrestling history.
If you’re a wrestling fan, the documentary hits on the nostalgic notes you want while providing a deeper look at the life of an icon.
But one of the reasons the documentary works is that it can keep non-wrestling fans just as engaged in its telling of the interesting and inherently sad story of Andre the Giant.
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