I AM: CELINE DION ★★★
(PG) 123 minutes
Who is Celine Dion without her voice? It’s a question the legendary Quebecois singer hopes we never need to answer, but a possibility that echoes throughout I Am: Celine Dion, the new documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Irene Taylor.
Singer Celine Dion’s career and battle with stiff person syndrome are captured in the documentary I Am: Celine Dion.Credit:
Taylor had been following Dion with her camera in the year before the singer was formally diagnosed with the rare neurological disease stiff person syndrome (SPS). The film attempts to invite us in to the reality of a life suddenly overwhelmed with medical intervention for a condition with no cure, and offer up comparisons with what that life was like before: one filled with performance and singing, instead of sedatives and immunotherapies.
In attempting to do the latter, the film’s structure is skittish and unwieldy. Archival concert footage from Dion’s 40-plus years on stage are presented as non sequiturs in between scenes of her twin teenage sons playing video games, and of her sending loving video messages to fans.
One early sequence takes us from an old concert, to news footage informing the world of her cancelled tour dates, to a charming trip to her hangar-sized warehouse filled with her collection of costumes and clothes, to an old clip of her scatting on stage with her band, to home-video footage of her pregnant with her first child in the early 2000s and pottering around at home, to a clip of her goofing around with Jimmy Fallon.
It might be too generous to justify these creative choices as a way to succinctly capture who Dion was – and is – outside of her reality living with a terrifying illness; there’s too little in the way of biographic or career detail to think these montages are filling in the blanks for viewers who’ve somehow avoided any awareness of Dion for decades. They felt distracting, but by the film’s end their purpose seemed more clear.
When focused solely on her present, the film soars. Dion is a captivating presence – as her status as a swan during late-2010s Euro fashion weeks can attest. (Not to mention her being the face of the “je telephone a la police” meme.)
She’s funny and warm and earnest. She talks in silly, captivating spirals and always lands somewhere human and real, whether she’s discussing life in Canada with her 13 older siblings or her desire to be able to sing like John Farnham.
Yes, wildly, in this intimate, harrowing story of a pop diva’s career and illness, a surprising number of minutes is dedicated to her playing her managers a YouTube video of Our Johnny covering the Beatles’ Help and admiring the husky, hoarse quality of his voice.
Her voice has always been such a finely tuned instrument, she explains, that she always felt jealous of the performers who could party and smoke after (or before) a concert. Singing fills Dion up and makes her feel alive. “Before I got really hit with SPS,” she says, “my voice was the conductor of my life. You lead the way, I’ll follow you.”
It’s especially cruel, having heard this, to witness, in the film’s final passage, what singing does to her now.
Over the course of filming, Dion only left her home three times. The final outing was to a studio, where she struggled to get a new song down on tape for the first time in three years. Eventually she does it. But the act stimulates her brain to such a grand degree it triggers a spasm.
Taylor’s cameras capture the process of her doctors laying her rigid body face-down, dosing out relaxants and warning that “going into a crisis” is possible. Her body won’t co-operate and her wide eyes are terrified. “If I can’t get stimulated by what I love …” an embarrassed Dion begins after the 40-minute episode is behind her. The end of the sentence hangs in the air.
The sequence of clips that plays next are short. They show a younger Dion not belting out an enormous chorus but simply walking on stage. The non-contextual editing choices come into relief: they weren’t showing us what she did in her career, they existed to show us how she could move in her body – and the power and confidence it gave her to have control over herself.
I Am: Celine Dion is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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