My local bartender knew how they did it. With a very particular limestone heating process, the concrete used in ancient Rome is not just sturdy but self-repairing, and why so many of their mega-structures continue to tower. In his first feature film, John Wilson traveled to Italy to find this same information, but unable to speak the language he mostly marveled at unique McDonald’s and how quickly a wax museum incorporated AI. He might’ve saved some money going to my Canadian dive instead of Europe, as I did following the advance screening, but the strange side quests have always been the point. While it doesn’t wrap things up as nicely as his HBO series, The History of Concrete discovers a foundational metaphor for modern anxieties.
In his critically acclaimed series show How To with John Wilson, the filmmaker would present himself with a question and follow the answer wherever it took him. In wanting to learn how to watch sports, he ends up at the Olympic games for vacuum cleaners. In wanted to choose better bottles of wine for dinner parties, he wanders unannounced into the Floridian compound of a charismatic energy drink mogul. The problems he faces in Concrete are twofold: He no longer has a TV show and he doesn’t know what his documentary should be about. When the foundations of his home fissures and his attempts to patch the leak fail to impress, he decides to learn more about the material used to build modern civilization. Maybe even master it.
Wilson uses his big screen debut to take us to many strange, uncanny and incredibly funny places. He shadows a specialist in chewing gum removal and samples his in-house wine label. He keeps up with a spiritualist jogging movement that runs around a city block for two uninterrupted months. He visits a Las Vegas concrete trade show, where niche futurists imagine how we’ll mix cement on the Moon. He speaks with NIMBYs, civil servants, Hallmark Channel producers, teenagers and tattoo artists, all the while trying to figure out how to ultimately sell the movie you’re currently watching.
Like his series, Wilson will expose you to amazing visions. He constructs picaresque, visual poetry, pulling from a collection of unstaged New York moments to emphasize his musings. Concrete might be the strongest material for this purpose. While the Romans made theirs tough, the modern equivalent can barely go a few years without showing its age. Concrete fractures, fissures. Patching it leaves gashes and scars. All around us, buildings are stapled back together with rusted metal bolts and packing tape. It’s so vulgar but so ubiquitous. We barely register it anymore, but it amounts to a sensation that things are crumbling beneath our feet.
The History of Concrete’s biggest failing is that, if you were hoping to introduce friends and loved ones to John Wilson’s world, it’s a bad entry point. The ribbon Wilson usually ties everything together feels missing, especially as he’s increasingly distracted by a local metal singer with an oddly high profile fiance. But the material is all there. The film is composed of paradoxical enigmas. How can an acclaimed documentarian sit across Kardashians at dinner engagements while his royalty checks fail to cover dipping sauce. How can communities grow and thrive when they refuse to sacrifice a blade of grass for Tony Hawk’s public skate park. It’s not a mystery once you compile the atrophy. How can you trust the future, find excitement for the new, when the existing foundation is straining.