I Am: Celine Dion review: This intimate, bruising doc is a wonder

It may sound like a small thing, but I am thankful filmmaker Irene Taylor and her subject Celine Dion didn’t opt to borrow any one of the singer’s many well-known songs to title this portrait of the artist at a heartbreaking crossroads in her life and career. After all, Dion’s battle with stiff person syndrome, which has forced her into seclusion in her Las Vegas home, unable to sing, perform, or, sometimes, even just walk around pain free in her own house, could quite easily been titled anything from “I’m Alive” and “A New Day Has Come” to “My Heart Will Go On” and “Pour que tu m’aimes encore”—all of which would have lent the project a rather maudlin sensibility. Instead, the simplicity of the documentary’s bilingual title (I Am: Celine Dion / Je Suis: Céline Dion) gets at the simple if elusive question that concerns it: Who is the Grammy-winning singer without her voice, without her stage, without her audience?

Such a question is made all the more pressing given the ambitions of young Celine Dion who, in the opening moments of the documentary, tells us the dreams she has for herself. “My dream is to be an international star,” the teenager tells the home video’s camera. Only, then she feels that may be either too limiting a dream or one too improbable. She immediately amends it with a seemingly more adequate dream: All she wants is to be able to sing for her entire life.

That moment of wide-eyed optimism, given all we know about the storied career that talented young girl would come to have, now has a more melancholy undertone. Dion did become an international star. She’s sold millions of albums. She’s toured the world several times over. She’s earned awards aplenty. But that other dream, which seemed more modest in comparison, may not come to be. For close to two decades now, as she reveals in I Am: Celine Dion, she’s been battling stiff person syndrome. It took years to be diagnosed and to explain why she’d been suffering from spasms that were affecting her mobility and, even more crucially, her ability to sing. By 2021, when Dion canceled her Vegas residency and basically retreated into seclusion, her health had suffered so much that even everyday tasks were grueling.

Throughout the candid interviews Taylor stages in Dion’s palatial Vegas home, we learn just how tall a toll this diagnosis is taking on the usually ebullient and effervescent performer. At times wistful and nostalgic, at others embarrassed if not outright embittered, Dion speaks with candor about how losing her ability to do the thing she loves most feels like a loss she cannot bring herself to explain, let alone comprehend. She’s always been “Celine Dion.” She’s always been called to perfection (in a childhood anecdote she remembers how irked she was even as a kid when an accompanying band would miss a note). She doesn’t know how to be fallible, or how to translate that into a workable way to sing, to be.

These intimate musings are the backbone of I Am: Celine Dion. They’re opportunities for Dion to talk about what she’s been going through for the past few years, perhaps for the very first time. With her body proving to be an adversary she never anticipated (during seizures, she quite literally cannot move), she retreats into her memories. Not to rest on her laurels or to bask in their glow but to find warmth and strength in the life she’s lived. Taylor makes a point of weaving Dion’s current struggles into moments from the past: not just sold out concerts or roaring crowds at her Vegas residency, but also quieter scenes with her large Québécois family, with her late husband René and her kids.

Cutting between unguarded moments where Dion is in tears—talking through her demanding physical therapy sessions and the many pills she’s dependent on—and flashy scenes where her vocal and physical prowess are on full display for the entire world to enjoy is heartwrenching. But there’s no self-pitying here. The documentary, taking its cue from Dion, is not merely looking backward; there’s a path ahead. What exactly that looks like is, as it turns out, being negotiated as the documentary unfolds. The key issue is that Dion’s once elastic and impressive vocal instrument cannot and does not bend to her wishes as it once did. It exasperates and unmoors her, in turn. And as we see her work with her physical therapist and care for her teenage twins, we are encouraged to see in this an upward journey. A move toward a world where Dion will be able to be back in the studio, back on the stage, back on top.

You want this for her. And, quite selfishly, perhaps, for ourselves. For decades, as the many performance clips showcase, Dion has been a powerhouse whose winning demeanor and honeyed romanticism has long been a balm. If she’s to overcome stiff person syndrome (which affects roughly one person in a million), it’d be proof a resilient spirit (and, perhaps, access to world-class health care) is all you need. It’s a testament to Taylor (and to Dion for sharing her unvarnished story) that I Am: Celine Dion actively works against such neat conclusions.

The final set-pieces of this bruising documentary—one following Dion as she struggles to record the song “Love Again” for the 2023 film of the same name, the other witnessing in discomfiting detail the terrifying seizure that follows—are powerful for how simply they spell out what Dion’s life now is. There are joys and there is struggle. Celine Dion, now unshackled, perhaps, from the persona she’s nurtured for decades, is adrift. But she is no less committed, no less enamored with her craft, with her calling. The doc rightly does not leave us with an uplifting message nor with a bleak one; it leaves us with the uncomfortable, if comforting, idea that the 56-year-old singer is still sorting out through who she was, who she is, and who she may yet become.