I Am: Celine Dion
Within minutes of commencing I Am: Céline Dion, the pop star’s incredibly frank documentary about her battle with an unusual neurological condition, she is on the floor curled up in a foetal position, surrounded by staff. Someone has called 911. When asked if she is in pain, all she can do is groan. The scene lasts only seconds but is scary and brief, Dion means it when she says having stiff person syndrome makes life very hard.
I Am: Céline Dion is like her music unapologetically sentimental and earnest, and mostly ego-free for a true pop diva (though I would watch another hour of her touring her vast Vegas warehouse of clothes). And it swings between extremes of volume as director Irene Taylor weaves together old performance footage from a 30-plus year career with Dion’s new reality of convalescence. High note after high note on stage; almost blowing out the microphone at a 90s recording session, cuts to Dion shuffling around her Vegas mansion with her elderly Labrador.
For most of the film, Dion appears to be in mourning for her calling. She has forgone makeup and hair dye and starry accoutrements (huge house and staff notwithstanding), opting instead for a plain white shirt, unfussy bun and uncut longing to get back on stage. And yet still slips into sing-songy mode scolding one of her sons off camera. Rest assured Céline may have taken time off work but she is still Céline: animated, forthright, born performer and true weirdo.
At one point early in the film there’s a “one year earlier” cut from what it’s not exactly clear to the period between when she cancelled her highly anticipated 2021 Vegas residency (citing unspecified health reasons) and the public announcement of her diagnosis in December 2022. The timeline for Taylor’s filming of her recovery, such as it is stiff-person syndrome (SPS) has no cure, and Dion says she has been managing symptoms, sometimes with a near fatal amount of Valium, for almost 20 years is a bit nebulous. SPS causes muscle stiffness and sometimes full spasms; the brain’s wrong-headed response to being overstimulated by loud sound and stress not the kindest fate for someone so emotionally attuned, so eager to summon bombastic sentiment, that she named her company (a co-producer on this film) Feeling Productions.
At the film’s New York premiere, which was also Dion’s first red carpet since announcing her diagnosis, Taylor said the singer’s only ask for the project had been that it not be talking heads, she would talk about herself. (Dion took about 10 minutes to say a few words thanking Taylor, her neurologist and her children at the screening I attended in Los Angeles last week because there were wild cheers and extremely dramatic pauses.) And talk she does about her family, about her shoes, about her voice as “conductor” of her life now straitjacketed by disease with SPS she can’t breathe enough air to hit the high notes (demonstrated through tears from herself and surely some viewers). But most of all about how much she loves performing for people. All pop stars must say this but Dion feels achingly sincere.
Pop star documentaries are often assessed in terms of their authenticity: The moments that pull back the curtain on show business; what new message to fans cuts through the curation of the old. Perhaps Dionne’s film feels more refreshing than most and there have been many, mostly about fame and the glare of public scrutiny is because she is an older, different kind of famous person. If she has reservations about her life in the spotlight, she does not let on. She loves being an entertainer. Her voice was a gift that she cherishes and loves to share, as evidenced by footage of her rehabilitating it and her past comfort on stage that Taylor pieces together in quick patchwork sometimes at the expense of both moments’ poignancy.
The pace is clipped like a veil, an opacity on worst case stiff person syndrome versus toll until it shows us a full, unvarnished nearly 10 minute recording of a spasm near the very end. This is easily the most brutal moment I have seen in any documentary this year. It comes right after what seems like this movie’s note of redemption; you might say that after fighting so hard for it in a recording booth, they earned it. I can only think to use that word here because after watching an international superstar consent via grunt to be filmed completely out of control while spasms immobilized her safety managed by specialists, hands mangled into claws, face frozen in grimace, glistening with tears anything else would feel cliché.
She has said that she is training to perform again, this structure leaves such a happy ending unrealized for now, triumph still not having outwitted tragedy. But it gives us no cause to doubt her or at least certainly not any less than we doubt our own tenacity or bone deep desire to hit those notes again either one. Dionne parts ways with her sports medicine specialist hours after releasing a goodbye song played via phone. She hums along, at first reservedly then upright, then standing and fist pumping, amping up an invisible crowd, still singing.
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