The irony is, there already has been a documentary about concrete. Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton came out last year, and it was pretty good. However, John Wilson makes his feature filmmaking debut with The History of Concrete, which opens this weekend at Alamo Drafthouse Denton and Look Cinemas Bedford, plus other theaters in Dallas County. If you’re not familiar with his HBO show How to With John Wilson, you should know that this documentary is more entertaining than either of the star-laden fiction films that I reviewed this week.
I guess the movie begins in the apartment building that he owns in New York City, where he lives upstairs and rents out the rooms downstairs. His tenants complain about flooding during the rainy seasons in spring and fall, and the cracks in the concrete inspire him to make this movie. He goes on a Zoom call with some of his financial backers, and when he tells them the title of the project that he’s pitching, their non-reactions say volumes.
Wilson records his own voiceover narration complete with all the “uhs” and “ums,” which should be way more annoying than it is, and speaks of himself in the second person: “You go to the Emmy Awards because your show is nominated, and at the moment when you lose, you find yourself staring directly at Lucy Liu.” He blows past his originally planned budget by traveling to Italy and asking people about the concrete structures that the ancient Romans built, many of which are still standing 2,000 years later.
His documentary free-associates like crazy, as Wilson attends a workshop on making Christmas movies for the Hallmark Channel and wonders how he can apply the lessons there to the film that we’re watching. Shortly thereafter, he interviews a man whose business is removing gum from city sidewalks and who has a sidelight as a winemaker, for reasons God only knows. From there, Wilson travels to Bellefontaine, Ohio to drive on the oldest concrete street in America. His conversation with a concrete salesman leads to his discovery that the young man is also an aspiring actor, so he observes the salesman portraying the lead role in a short film. At McGill University, geography professor Mette Bendixen informs us that Chinese developers used more concrete between 2011 and 2014 than America used in all of the 20th century.
If I’m making all this sound scattershot, the hijinks do eventually come together when John interviews his buddy Jack Macco, the lead guitarist of a cover band called Nebulus who sometimes hands out free samples of mezcal at the local liquor store. Despite their friendship, John is unaware that Jack has a 78-year-old fiancée until she dies in early 2025, and she turns out to have been a former New York Supreme Court justice and assistant dean at Harvard Law School.
Wilson’s ruminations on concrete become a disquisition on the impermanence of all things. The ancient Romans notwithstanding, most concrete starts to crack after about 40 years or so, which is why New York City is frantically trying to replace its sidewalks and bridges before catastrophe strikes, and why that street in Bellefontaine is in such terrible shape. The Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán passed away recently, and he too had Wilson’s capability for finding the entire world in an astronomer’s telescope or a button made of mother-of-pearl. If Wilson isn’t as meticulous a craftsman as Guzmán, he is definitely funnier. Now’s a good time to appreciate both their achievements.
The History of Concrete
Starring and directed by John Wilson. Not rated.
