Celebrity documentaries often tend to be varnished portraits. The celebrated individual is hyper-mythologized and put on an even higher pedestal. It is like the cardinal opposite of what a documentary is supposed to imply and operate with. Instead of honesty, there is a patina of gloss and vibrant artifice. Yes, there may be a token sprinkling of shortcomings that are addressed, but the documentary quickly brushes them aside and reverts to an elevated mode, where expecting any form of truth can be a tall ask. The celebrity reinstates his or her grip on a personal projection, refusing to hand over the reins to the filmmaker.
A disingenuousness creeps up in the whole enterprise, and the film lapses into being a vehicle to rehash the wishes of fandom and burnish the figure’s pre-existing stature. It acquires all the usual trappings of a bloated vanity project, carefully dressed up to deflect any glimpse at the difficulties and hardships and loose ends of a life in progress. Irene Taylor Brodsky’s documentary, “I am: Celine Dion,” is an astonishing exception, sidestepping all such lazy inclinations and plunging with heartfelt audacity into the iconic singer’s most intimate, vulnerable moments.
The documentary is as unvarnished and naked as it gets by way of a peek into one of the world’s biggest singers. Dion has enthralled and bewitched generations with her songs. Her public persona is vibrant, funny, engaged, witty, and endlessly endearing. She is an artist who tightly wove every edge of her indubitable talent with a rapt live audience, pulling them into the sway of a song with ease, friendliness, and abundant openness. As she herself underlines at a moment in the documentary, it is the performance that counts, not so much the song.
She acutely understands that is her most prized asset: to effortlessly connect with the pulse of an audience with unrestrained energy, candor, and ever-fresh appeal. But not everything is inexhaustible and a career is also marked by dipping points as it is by an enormity of success. The film is a reckoning of Dion with a time in her life when she was surrounded by the most severe blows of SPS, stiff-person syndrome, a neurological disease that afflicts one in a million. She had had signs of it for almost two decades before she officially and publicly disclosed her diagnosis. The spasms appeared every now and then.
The documentary is filled with blazing frankness and the most moving spirit of intimacy. Yes, there is the customary style of cutting back and forth between home videos, concert performances, archival snapshots, and direct, confessional, free-flowing rhythms, as one would expect in biographical accounts. Yet, at no point can we feel the strain of these interweaving threads being hemmed into place so as to form the portrait of the artist. Unguarded and exhibiting a naked sense of emotional, personal truth, Dion guides us gently through her reminiscences and reflections on the crushing negotiation with her medical crisis.
These aren’t just unfiltered; they are nearly abrasive in the force with which the director plumbs the singer’s barely repressed anguish. There’s the escalating fear Dion is confronted with, that she may lose it all, and never again will she be able to experience the ‘drug-fix’ of performing live. For years, she has kept afloat through concerts by maneuvering herself out of situations when she felt she was nearing a crack or a spasm might erupt. She opens up almost guiltily that she has cheated and lied, but she can no longer withhold herself.
As terrifying as the realization dawns on her of a vast loss, of things she held dearest and sustained her, “I am: Celine Dion” persistently and invigoratingly stresses her unbreakable resolve and perseverance to get back on her feet even after feeling utterly lost. Despair leaks throughout, but the artist isn’t one for self-pity, fighting doggedly for the love of music and bringing people together through her immeasurable gift.
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