[COLUMN] The Faith Tour Demonstrates Why Concert Films are Better Than Biopics | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Faith Tour, the George Michael concert film being released this weekend constructed from two performances in Paris as part of the promotional tour around his album Faith, opens with a short pseudo-documentary from Mary McCartney, titled Finding Faith. This short film uses recently discovered audio from George Michael discussing the album and the concert, playing over a variety of photos taken as part of the promotion from that era. It is George Michael in his own words.

There is something endearing and refreshing in the relative simplicity of Finding Faith, which allows Michael to talk at length about his work and about this particular moment in his career, juxtaposed with very simple still images of the man himself. There is no fancy editing involved. It is just presented as is. This is a relief, in an era where these sorts of projects – documentaries like 14th or Musk – have begun to feel more comfortable employing generative artificial intelligence.

Finding Faith speaks to the appealing simplicity of The Faith Tour. Over the past decade, musical biopics have emerged as a major cultural force. There were always, of course, movies like The Buddy Holly Story right up to Walk the Line. However, the genre really exploded over the past decade, in large part thanks to the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) biopic that grossed over $900m and won four of the five Academy Awards for which it was nominated.

Bohemian Rhapsody led to a host of imitators: Rocketman, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Back to Black, Bob Marley: One Love, Elvis, A Complete Unknown. Some of these films were quite good, while others were very bad. The genre even got an updated spoof with Weird: The Al Yankovich Story. Earlier this year, Michael demonstrated that the genre still has life in it, grossing over a billion dollars and emerging as a viable Oscar contender.

These are more than just celebrity biographies. They are commercials. They not only generate box office revenue, they raise awareness of the brand and serve as canny promotional tools designed to drive downloads and streams of the artist’s back catalogue. In the case of performers who are still living, these films can serve as the motivating factor behind a late tour. These films are often produced with the involvement of either the celebrity themselves or the surviving rights’ holders.

In the cases where a film is being made about a dead artist, one of the more uncomfortable and unsettling aspects of these films is the manipulation of the dead artist to flatter the egos and burnish the reputation of those who still live. Bohemian Rhapsody offers a version of Freddie Mercury’s life where the surviving members of Queen, who were heavily involved in the production, never took drugs or had affairs, and did nothing but express concern over Freddie’s tendency to do both.

Michael was produced in part by Michael Jackson’s long-time lawyer John Branca, who manages the estate. Branca was reportedly very involved in the production of the film, which caused some tension within the family. Michael is the rare musician biography to suggest that the only person who ever really understood the artist was his lawyer and financial planner, and it’s also notable that the cinematic version of Branca is played by the only real star in the film: Miles Teller.

However, in parallel with this trend of biographical films, there has also been an explosion in concert films, driven by similar but distinct factors. If the biopic boom can trace its roots back to the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, it seems fair to place the point of origin of this modern wave of concert films as the twinned releases of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé at the end of 2023.

It is worth situating these releases in context. Movie theatres were experiencing a drought in releases driven by the pandemic and the various strikes. Theatres needed big ticket items to attract audiences. Tellingly, both Swift and Beyoncé bypassed the traditional distribution model and worked with theatres directly. At the same time, as the cost of living was increasing and ticket prices for live performances were soaring, these films allowed fans to experience these events vicariously.

These concert films emerged in the midst of a larger trend in modern cinemagoing. Cinema was becoming eventized. It was being packaged and sold less as a regular activity where people would just go to the cinema and see whatever happened to be playing and more as a special occasion driven in part by fear of missing out. Audiences flocked to “Barbenheimer.” Premium format tickets for The Odyssey were sold out months in advance. “Chicken Jockey” was a phenomenon.

In short, cinemas became more like concerts. It is not uncommon, for example, to see younger audience members snapping photos of title cards on their phone, as if snapping proof that they saw a particular artist live. In that context, it makes sense that concert films would see something of a revival in recent years. Of course, concert films always existed. In fact there are several canonical classic concert films like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.

However, the trend feels particularly pronounced over the past year or so. The past couple of months have, for example, seen two separate major releases of concert films either directed or co-directed by two of the greatest living filmmakers: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley in Concert and James Cameron’s Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D). And, like the works of Scorsese or Demme, these don’t feel like low-effort projects. These are major films for those directors.

So there have been a number of major theatrical releases of these sorts of concert films, whether contemporary or archival. Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger received a nice theatrical release before ending up on Disney+. And George Michael: The Faith Tour has (at least in the United Kingdom and Ireland) received a significant press and media push from distributor Universal Pictures. There was both a morning press screening and an evening multimedia to promote its release.

And, honestly, if the choice is between the generic paint-by-numbers jukebox buy-o-pics like Michael and Bohemian Rhapsody or concert films like Elvis Presley in Concert and The Faith Tour, the concert films feel much more artistically satisfying and respectful of the talent that these projects profess to celebrate. Of course, they also generate a mere fraction of the box office and awards success. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic grossed $288m, while his Elvis Presley in Concert earned a meager $23m.

This is not the worst thing in the world. These projects are relatively cheap to produce, compared to a major theatre film – the concert is being staged anyway, and the production value derives from that, it’s largely the shooting and editing that costs money. Still, it’s easy to understand why so many of these families and estates will opt for the expensive narrative jukebox musical biopic over the low-risk, medium-return concert film as a way of promoting the brand.

It’s just a shame, because these concert films can be quietly beautiful, deriving a tenderness from their honesty. Luhrmann’s Elvis is a great film, and it mines a great deal of tragedy from the singer’s clear desire to travel to Japan, to leave this gilded cage in which he finds himself. However, that idea becomes even more tragic and affecting when Luhrman finds real footage of the real Elvis doing a press conference talking about how thrilled he is to be planning a tour that the audience knows he will never actually get to perform.

And there is a similar beauty in The Faith Tour. One of the more remarkable things about seeing a concert film like this with a crowd is watching a performer with genuine star energy work a crowd, despite being separated by decades of time, thousands of miles and the barrier of the screen itself. Michael works the audience in Paris so incredibly hard, but he also somehow works the audience in the cinema, too.

As he urges the audience in the stadium to clap along in rhythm, hands in the cinema start moving as well. When Michael declares the audience is going to sing the entirety of “Faith”, voices echo through the cinema as much as they do on the soundtrack. It is an argument for releasing a film like this in cinemas. It’s much harder to imagine feeling that energy sitting on a couch by one’s self. It is magical, and it is a testament to Michael’s undeniable energy and persona.

More to the point, though, something like The Faith Tour affords Michael some small measure of control over his own narrative. It is just as much a promotional tool for the estate as Michael or Bohemian Rhapsody. The opening title card informs the viewer that this is a “George Michael Entertainment” production. However, the constructed image of Michael on screen is, at least in part, crafted by the artist himself.

After all, George Michael was part of the wave of postmodern popstars of the 1980s, alongside figures like David Bowie or Madonna, where his art existed of itself, but it also existed in conversation with his public image. In Finding Faith, Michael talks about feeling stifled as a member of the pop duo Wham!, and how his reinvention for the album Faith was an attempt to express something closer to himself.

Fans will appreciate the irony that Michael would essentially shed the iconography of Faith in the same way that he broke free of Wham!, with David Fincher’s iconic video for “Freedom ’90” featuring Michael burning his iconic leather jacket from Faith as he sang, “There’s someone else I’ve got to be.” Michael was ostensibly pushing back against the attempts to impose an image and narrative on him, the efforts of the industry to package and commodify him.

There is, of course, a deeper subtext. Michael was gay, and spent a large portion of his career and life in the closet. In particular, his early career found the artist marketed as a sex symbol to a young female audience. After he was arrested for public indecency, Michael would fold this into his music in a similarly self-aware fashion, constructing “Outside” as a Village-People-esque fluffy pop piece layered with double entendres (“I’d service the community”) but informed by a more profound existential crisis (“there’s nothing here but flesh and bone – there’s nothing more”).

And there are small, beautiful moments in The Faith Tour that feel more genuine than any attempt to conform Michael’s story to a clean three-act structure would allow: a quick shot of Michael with his back to the audience taking a moment to wipe a tear from his eye, an extended sequence in which he very deliberately ignores the fan in the front row offering him a single rose as a gesture of fidelity. These might not have been conscious decisions, but the images speak volumes.

Near the end of Finding Faith, just before the concert film begins in earnest, Michael talks about his plans for the tour. He boasts that he has a strong vision for what he wants it to look like, but also refuses to be drawn into explaining or articulating what that vision entails. At the climax of the film, after his extended encore, three gigantic metal grids slowly lower around the three sides of the stage visible to the audience.

The closing image of The Faith Tour is Michael standing on stage, a performer trapped in a cage, still visible to the audience behind the iron bars. It is an evocative image, and it feels like a profound statement by Michael on his art and his persona and his stardom. Here, at the end of The Faith Tour, is an image of Michael cast by the artist himself on something approaching his own terms. It’s a beat that feels far more genuine and sincere than any big estate-driven biopic would allow.