Celine Dion Can Only Be Herself

By Lindsay Zoladz

“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.”

This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend. A professional singer since 12, she spent decades meticulously caring for her voice as though it were an endangered hothouse flower, committing to long stretches of vocal rest, complicated warm-up rituals and a lifestyle of exacting discipline — all so she could leap octaves and belt soaring notes with gobsmacking precision.

In a cruel twist of fate, though, even the ceaseless care Dion devoted to her voice could not preserve it. In 2022, she revealed in an emotional Instagram post that she has stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that causes painful muscle spasms and affects roughly one in a million people. After watching “I Am: Celine Dion,” a remarkably candid portrait directed by Irene Taylor on Amazon Prime Video, it is difficult to imagine a disease that would be more personally devastating to Dion, whose entire career has been one long exercise in control, sacrificing all for the ecstatic release of live performance.

Since her emergence as a Québécois child star with a precociously huge voice, something about Dion’s essential nature has remained constant, impervious to both changing trends and scathing critique. Whether power ballads were in fashion or not — and by and large, they were not — she sang them with the conviction of someone who’d never even heard the word “restraint.” “At her best,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in a Times review of Dion’s most recent New York performance in February 2020, “Dion projects a sense of bigness — besides fairly simple graphics, the background videos in her show often showed cosmic images, as if they were the only thing measuring up on the Dion scale.” This bombastic approach gained her a worldwide fan base and a requisite backlash that she may have finally outpaced.

In 2007, the music critic Carl Wilson used Dion’s 1999 blockbuster album “Let’s Talk About Love” as the inspiration for an insightful, ultimately sympathetic book-length examination of musical taste, the assumption being that (at least 17 years ago) Dion’s name was a symbol for all things gauche, sincere and uncool. (The book’s subtitle? “A Journey to the End of Taste.”) “Schmaltz rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry,” Wilson wrote, “which may be why we doubt the possibility of a Celine Dion revival in 2027.”

As the years have passed, I wouldn’t bet against it. The sympathy engendered by her diagnosis aside, Dion is not nearly as polarizing as she was two decades ago. “My Heart Will Go On” has become a relic of kitschy ’90s nostalgia rather than the unavoidable and tiresome cultural monolith it was during the reign of “Titanic.” Musical tastes have become more elastic since Wilson’s book was published, streaming has lowered the stakes for fandom and made it easier to revisit artists’ catalogs, and listeners are less likely to see the industry bifurcated into us-vs.-them binaries.

But one of the main reasons people have softened toward Dion over the years is her absolute, undaunted commitment to her own kookiness. In 2008, the writer Rich Juzwiak put together a supercut of wacky clips titled “Celine Dion is amazing”: more than five minutes of Dion gesticulating wildly, indulging in nonsensical stage banter and, in one instance, launching into a spirited backstage cover of “Who Let the Dogs Out" mashed up with “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” That over-the-top excessiveness at which Wilson and his hip Gen X-er peers once turned up their noses now seems like a virtue; denizens of the internet appreciate a reliably meme-able celebrity when they see one. Dion never seems to fear looking ridiculous. In an age of media-trained musicians careful not to speak out of pocket, her zaniness has become its own mark of authenticity.

“I Am: Celine Dion” has plenty of those “Celine Dion is amazing”-type moments, and thank goodness, because her singular, offbeat sense of humor balances out the film’s more harrowing scenes. Rather than relying on other talking heads to put her stardom in context, Dion is the only person interviewed in the documentary. While this does sometimes make the film’s perspective feel one-sided, Dion’s megawatt charisma means she is more than up to the task of carrying an entire film on her own. One of the most memorable sequences finds her giving the cameras a tour — “I feel like Liberace!” she says and laughs — through the vast storage warehouse where she keeps her ruffle-and-sequin-encrusted costumes, custom designer outfits and stilt-like shoes. Oh, the shoes.

“When a girl loves her shoes, she always makes them fit,” Dion says, imparting the wisdom of a true diva. “Every time I went to a store and I loved the shoes they said, ‘What size are you, ma’am?’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand, what size do you have? I’ll make them work, I’ll make them fit.’”

It’s a hilarious moment, but it’s also bittersweet. Again, there is that sense of self-sacrifice — the insistence that even in the face of discomfort the show (and the shoe) must go on. As she walks among her old stage clothes, delighting in the minute details of craftsmanship, the joy Dion gets from performing is palpable, but so is the anxiety that she may never know that particular kind of release again.

“When you record, it sounds great,” Dion says in the film. “But when you are onstage, it will be greater.” What becomes clear — throughout many montages of Dion singing live, feeding off the energy of her audience — is that performing is her lifeblood, and the stage has always been the place where she can be her most quintessential self. And so she is putting the full force of her tenacity and self-discipline toward building her strength back, in hopes that she can someday return.

That is, however, a herculean task. Toward the end of the documentary, during a physical therapy session, Taylor’s cameras continue to roll while Dion experiences a severe attack of full-body spasms; her face is frozen in pain, her limbs stiffen and the only sounds she can make are awful moans. For an artist who has long valued the control she has over her body and the instrument of her voice, this level of candor is particularly striking.

Just as difficult to watch is the sequence that precedes it, which finds Dion in a recording studio struggling to sing the relatively muted ballad, “Love Again.” Her vocal cords constrict — she compares the spasms to an unseen hand choking her — and that once mighty voice comes out in a whisper. Ever the perfectionist, she winces listening to the playback.

In the film, Dion compares herself to an apple tree, proud of doling out the shiniest fruit for her fans. “I don’t want them to wait in line if I don’t have apples for them,” she says. She still does, though. Dion’s voice may no longer be the precise instrument she nurtured for decades, but “I Am: Celine Dion” shows that hitting those stratospheric high notes is not her only method of inspiration. There is strength, too, in sharing the bitter fruit of her struggles, and throughout them remaining gloriously, consistently herself.

Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic

The New York Times