Celine Dion lays bare her demons in a new documentary that’s almost unwatchably brutal.
In ‘I Am: Celine Dion’ we see an icon diminished, holed up amid Las Vegas splendor, crippled by agony, sustained by boatloads of Valium, literally seizing, weeping – shrieking – on camera.
Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS), her autoimmune disease of one-in-a-million rarity, has paralyzed her voice and stolen her ability to sing.
The muscles in her chest, she explains, push against her lungs, strangling her superhuman song machine.
‘I don’t want fans to hear that,’ she cries, rasping out a few bars. She doesn’t want to be seen but she feels she must.
‘The lying is too heavy,’ she says, revealing how she’s secretly battled SPS for nearly two decades, concocting excuses and ruses for cancelled shows – a sinus infection, a hearing problem – or putting the microphone to the audience when she couldn’t get the words out, and taking scores of pills a day.
‘I could have died,’ she admits.
In ‘I Am: Celine Dion’ we see the icon diminished, holed up amid Las Vegas splendor, crippled by agony, sustained by boatloads of Valium, literally seizing, weeping – shrieking – on camera.
After scrapping her planned 2021 Sin City residency, she feels she owes paying fans an explanation – Adele, take note! – and vows a return to the stage: ‘If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl… I won’t stop.’
The problem: It’s hard to know if her sheer force of will, her limitless bravery, will be enough. And who is Celine Dion without her voice?
We see her life and career boxed in a warehouse, clinical, almost funereal: Shoes and costumes, gowns and her children’s old toys – never to be worn or played with again.
Between IV drips and plasma infusions, she struggles to maintain normalcy for her sons – the two youngest, just 13-years-old, likely don’t much remember their father.
René died in 2016, and it’s clear Celine never recovered. How much suffering can one woman take?
After a two-year break from singing, she forces herself through a painful recording session, obsessing in a way only a true star can.
Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS), her autoimmune disease of one-in-a-million rarity, has paralyzed her voice and stolen her ability to sing.
She hates what she hears on the playback and pushes her body to break through – the miserable penance that follows is enough to make you turn away.
Her therapist first notices the ebbing spasm in her foot. Relax, he says, her ankle locked at 90-degrees.
But her hands contort like claws and soon she’s lying rigid on her front, her back arching unnaturally, and unable to lift her neck.
Then comes the frothing, full-blown seizure. Medical staff rush in but the nosey cameras remain.
Diva down.
Ten long minutes of tortured convulsions and child-like cries, tears smear her makeup-free face. How could we be allowed to see such intimate torment?
I wanted to jump through the screen and help, to turn away the prying lens and save her last dregs of dignity.
But in admitting her embarrassment, at exposing her loss of control, Celine takes control – and gives us the most honest narrative she can muster of her life, her legacy, this cruel final chapter.
Her hands contort like claws and soon she’s lying rigid on her front, her back arching unnaturally, and unable to lift her neck. Then comes the frothing, full-blown seizure.
Ten long minutes of tortured convulsions and child-like cries, tears smear her makeup-free face. How could we be allowed to see such intimate torment?
In lieu of a voice, this may be all she has left to offer legions of admirers desperate for one more performance.
No one is ready for this to be the last goodbye – least of all Celine herself.
We witness a woman who subsists on hope and a ferocious desire to channel her remaining talent and energy into recovery. We pray with her for a nebulous intervention – medicinal or miraculous – to pull her back from the brink.
But worse than any on-screen trauma is the enduring realization that this grand tour of Celine’s life and pain is being told now so that she gets to tell it, a living eulogy for a star that refuses to be dimmed.