During a recent Pop Culture Happy Hour review of the Tig Notaro film Am I OK?, co-host Margaret H. Willison kicks off the conversation about the film by saying: “So often, the equivalent in modern times culture-wise of ‘this meeting should have been an email’ is ‘this TV series should have been a movie’ and this is the opposite.” That quote echoed through the dense caverns of my frontal lobe as I watched Irene Taylor’s harrowing new documentary feature, I Am: Celine Dion. In one hour and forty two minutes, the film attempts to contextualize Dion’s four-decade plus career and give unfiltered access to Dion as she battles symptoms of the rare neurological condition stiff-person syndrome (SPS). And while it succeeds at the latter, the gargantuan undertaking leaves us with an ultimately wonky feature. Always leave them wanting more though, right?
And yet, what saves this film, as it should be, is its subject. Celine Dion is infinitely and endlessly watchable. There’s a moment at one point in the film where she rustles through a drawer of sharpies trying to find the right color. Simply watching her fingers try to make a decision is gripping. Seeing her sock drawer is more compelling than most contemporary runway shows. Watching her vacuum her couch feels, for me, what I imagine the Super Bowl is like for sports fans.
Let’s unpack.