The new film “I Am: Celine Dion” has the makings of a tightly controlled, branded celebrity vanity project that poses as a documentary. That title? Big J.Lo vibes.
This suspicion is no doubt informed by prejudicial ideas about its subject, Celine Dion, the ubiquitous, walking-punchline belter of insufferably corny torch ballads. However, even people traumatized by overexposure to “My Heart Will Go On” will feel terrible for dragging that baggage into a film that delivers a devastating portrait of a person in distress.
After terrorizing the planet with a seemingly unending supply of drippy adult-contemporary love songs, Dion by the 2010s had settled into a comfortable afterlife as the star of a greatest-hits residency in Las Vegas, where her vocal melodramatics fit the twinkling neon artifice of the setting.
For years, however, she had been quietly suffering from a mysterious ailment that caused muscle spasms, vocal issues, chronic pain and breathing problems and which forced her to give up performing. “By 2020, I could barely walk,” she tells the cameras.
In 2022, after canceling a tour that had already been postponed by the pandemic, Dion shared that she had been diagnosed with Stiff-Person Syndrome. It is an inelegant name for a rare, incurable neurological and autoimmune condition that causes debilitating bouts of immobility — a cruelly ironic fate for a person defined by physicality that seemed superhuman.
“I Am,” directed by Irene Taylor and now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a modestly scaled film. Dion is not aiming to get back on the charts or mount a comeback tour. Instead she is merely trying to get through her days, handling business, reflecting on her career and spending time with her three sons. (Dion’s manager and longtime husband, Rene Angelil, died in 2016.)
The effects of her disease are unmistakable. Dion, minus the stage makeup and elaborate costuming that characterized her performing life, moves gingerly around her house, expending extraordinary effort to perform mundane tasks, doting on her aging dog and savoring the pleasure of a comfortable pair of socks.
Dion projects a warm, goofy screen presence even in her diminished state, which is juxtaposed with old performance footage featuring intricate stagecraft, demanding choreography and pyrotechnic singing.
This contrast would have made the film poignant even without the direct confrontation with her illness that we eventually see. Dion returns to the studio to record vocals for an unspecified project. Her voice, a pale, raspy echo of its resplendent peak, strains to hit notes that once came easily. But she is energized by the experience.
Too much, in fact. The overstimulation sends Dion into a frightening seizure, and the camera keeps rolling as her team administers treatment and her face contorts into a horrified grimace. For a performer as carefully stage-managed as Dion, the moment startling in its intimacy.
Even after this happens, Dion exudes an optimism that is hard to square with what the film depicts. She is eager to get back on stage, but based on what “I Am” shows, it is difficult to imagine that happening anytime soon, if ever.
Every athlete or performer must eventually reconcile their aspirations with what their body will allow, and if they lose the thing that defines them — in her case, a voice — then who are they when it is gone? And what is aging if not making peace with (or remaining in denial of) that reality? “I Am” does not offer answers, because those answers do not exist.
Dion’s circumstances are unique and extreme, but “I Am” scratches at something universal. We each have a mortal body that will one day fail us, either catastrophically or gradually. Unlike Dion, most of us will not have an audience (or a warehouse full of old stage costumes) to remind us of earlier glories. But like her, we will enter this chapter long before we are ready for it.