For those in the know, the release of the Sundance film festival lineup last December contained one perfect, tantalizing log line, for a documentary plainly called The History of Concrete: “After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete.”
Wilson, a film-maker from the Nathan Fielder school of meandering, bone-dry observational comedy, is a master of the modern documentary-essay-memoir, with an uncanny eye for the idiosyncratic, unintentionally hilarious and disturbing vignettes hiding in plain sight. Over three near-perfect seasons, his peerless HBO series How To With John Wilson, executive-produced by Fielder, spun spoofs of practical guides (“How to Cook the Perfect Risotto”) into profound meditations on the loudness, loneliness and ridiculousness of modern urban life, each half-hour episode a magic trick of elaborate, bizarre tangents reined in at the last second. For fans of the show – in my opinion, the single best TV series about New York this decade – Wilson’s feature documentary debut, supposedly about the most iconic element of urban life, was a must-see.
Good news for me, then, as The History of Concrete is essentially a 100-minute version of a How To episode, with extra diversions and the added absurdity of Wilson’s newfound status as a celebrity, of sorts. His signature greeting – “Hey, New York” – belies a weird time to start filming. His HBO series, which got his face on to a Times Square billboard and his team to the Emmys, is over. He has reached an alien, distinctly 2020s mid-level of success: his face is on black-market weed products (“high, New York!”), he’s getting offers to collab with Arby’s, he’s the answer to a $1,000 question on Jeopardy! that no one gets. Most flatteringly, someone on TikTok is using an AI-generated version of his voice to sell gutters. Finding direction for the next thing, he relatably confides in his signature stilted, nasally narration, is hard.
Enter the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), which during the 2023 strikes offered members like Wilson a workshop called “How To Make and Sell A Hallmark Movie”. Wilson, his sixth sense for oddity piqued, brings home a risible montage of practical tips: trauma is fine if it ends on a high note, film in Canada, avoid The Big City Girl Goes Home trope in the post-girlboss era. A real Hallmark movie called ’Twas the Date Before Christmas, about an affordable housing developer attempting to buy out a candle shop (or something), sparks an idea: if Hallmark can do property development, why can’t he sell concrete? As he correctly realizes – and I will continue thinking about this – it is embarrassing to know so little about something that dominates your visual environment.
This is a spin on an old Wilson idea; The History of Concrete is basically a sequel to How To’s all-timer second episode about scaffolding, which proved that with enough close attention, even the most mundane and boring of subjects can become fascinating, a portal into universal human themes. Through Wilson’s narration, an $8bn industry of metal poles and planks to keep chunks of building from hitting our heads asked bigger questions about the cost of safety, how seemingly temporary things become permanent. Similarly, and along with Cori Wapnowska’s pinpoint editing, concrete – apparently the second most-used material on the planet after water, the stuff of our cracked roads and gum-stained sidewalks – becomes both a symbol of decay and a metaphor for hardscrabble, imperfect change.
Thematic and stylistic repetition, in this case, does not indicate stagnation. Fame, however niche or sporadic, seems to have only enhanced Wilson’s singular magpie instinct for the discordant, mismatched and gloriously profane – he is perhaps the only person who could film a ritzy LA dinner with Kim Kardashian and an Ohio driver’s ed class with the same offbeat curiosity. There’s plenty of hilarity and wonder to be found in Wilson’s gold-standard visual collages and wacky tangents, from a junior bricklaying competition to a 3,100-mile race around a single block in Queens. As ever, he finds borderline unbelievable characters who deliver lines like “mean Gene the embalming machine!”, and whose risible appearances never feel compelled by mockery.
Still, the connective tissue is a little loose and baggy, even by Wilson’s admirably loose standards; at times, particularly in the film’s lagging final third, Wilson seems more interested in chasing absurdity – just seeing how far following a true eccentric will take him – than finding a cohesive point. Though Hallmark did advise mixing serious bits with audience hooks, more informative tangents on affordable housing, New York’s crumbling infrastructure and hobbling nimbyism peter out before fully landing the punch, as if Wilson was afraid of getting too polemical.
Still, he sticks the landing. As a standalone film, The History of Concrete is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and surprising, if 20 minutes too long. And, of course, about much more than just concrete. It is about languishing in periods of transition, the difficulty of convincing yourself to move forward. It’s about trying to keep making documentaries in this era of vanishing budgets and media consolidation. About false feelings of security, haunting impermanence and moving forward, gum stains and all. You know, the real hard stuff.
The History of Concrete is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
