GLEN CAMPBELL I'LL BE ME
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me Glen Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011, he went public with the news and then announced that he would go on tour one last time before the condition robbed him of his talents. It was an act of incredible courage, and kudos to director James Keach for hopping on the bus and documenting what happened. It’s not always a pretty picture, but it’s an important record of the uneven, unpredictable, as-yetincurable ravages of the disease, both on individuals and their families. Keach wisely keeps the background to a minimum. There are thousands of hours of footage of Campbell over more than a half a cen- tury, but the focus is on the man today — or rather in 2012, when he was still lucid enough to make light of his illness. Humour served him well; in one show he tells the audience that he would walk into the kitchen and forget why he came in. His solution was to stay out of the kitchen. Campbell’s fourth wife, Kim, is even more candid about the ups and downs of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s. At one point, she reveals, a change in the dosage of the drug Aricept (used to slow the disease’s progress) affected her husband like a booster shot of Viagra. By his final concert, Campbell’s clearly struggling on the stage as well as off, although music seems to steady him more than anything else. I’ll Be Me doesn’t aim to put a friendly face on the disease, but neither does it look to offer up the ghoulish train wreck of a strong man laid low. Instead, it steers a middle path, finding humanity amid the tragedy and, one hopes, doing its bit to advocate for the resources to find a cure. Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me opens April 3 in Toronto, and May 11 in Vancouver. ΩΩΩ½