John Wilson’s Poignant, Quirky Doc

The History of Concrete was one of my most anticipated films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in part because I’m eager to see how the documentary plays to an audience that doesn’t let out a gasp of excitement at the credit “A film by John Wilson.”

Although TV critics and people who get along well with TV critics are aware that How To with John Wilson, which ran three seasons on HBO between 2020 and 2023, is one of the finest shows of the decade, your average TV viewer could be forgiven for not keeping track of bizarre documentary-comedy hybrids airing at 11 p.m. on Friday nights.

For some readers, describing The History of Concrete as a 101-minute episode of How To with John Wilson will be cause for celebration; for others, it will be absolutely meaningless.

So to that first group, I say quickly that How To with John Wilson is nothing more or less than a 101-minute episode of How To with John Wilson, in terms of aesthetics, intellectual approach and sensibility.

I don’t think it possesses the emotional sucker punch delivered by “How To Cook the Perfect Risotto,” the How To episode that represents the finest filmed encapsulation of the COVID pandemic; nor can it compete with the dazzling twists and resolutions in “How To Track Your Package,” the series finale. But I doubt any movie, especially not any documentary, will make me laugh harder this year, and many of its emotional grace notes land fully. Even with my high expectations, The History of Concrete is a small triumph.

But how to explain what The History of Concrete is and why it’s so effective to somebody randomly walking into a Park City theater unaware or innocently finding it on whatever streaming service will eventually be its home?

John Wilson is the Werner Herzog of the mundane, the lo-fi poet laureate of New York City. He’s half puckish prankster, half earnest documentarian, all inquisitive wanderer. Once you tap into his vibe, carefully written and edited to seem stream-of-consciousness, the viewing experience is like the most laconic roller coaster imaginable.

The History of Concrete begins with Wilson pondering his next steps. He made some money, but not enough to lay fallow forever. He achieved enough fame to be a question on Jeopardy!, but not enough for anybody to correctly answer. He doesn’t have a next project and he doesn’t want to occupy himself shooting commercials, and it’s the middle of the WGA strike, so his options are limited.

Wilson responds, in John Wilson-ian fashion, by attending a seminar on how to make Hallmark movies, which leads him to watch the 2024 telefilm ‘Twas the Date Before Christmas, in which the main character is a real estate developer, which leads to multiple Reddit threads on NIMBYs, which leads to Wilson’s own reflections as an owner of an apartment building with major leaks in the foundation, which leads him to attempt to patch the foundation himself, which leads him to learn the difference between cement and concrete.

That, friends, leads to the title of the documentary and as pure an encapsulation of John Wilson’s storytelling approach as I could possibly provide, because that series of detours and loops represents only the first 10 minutes of The History of Concrete.

Like episodes of his TV series, The History of Concrete is a meandering succession of vague connections and intuitive leaps. These take Wilson to flashy concrete conventions in Las Vegas, the material’s functional origins in Rome — if you think explaining Wilson’s thing to American neophytes is hard, picture explaining it to Italian construction workers — and the country’s oldest operational concrete street, somewhere in Ohio.

He meets people including an opera singer whose voice has been harmed by concrete dust, an aging aspiring rock singer whose day job is giving out samples at a liquor store, and the owner and operator of GumBusters, New York City’s leading gum removal service.

The vignettes are, once again, fused by Wilson’s b-roll footage captured during his perambulations around the city, and driven by a preoccupation with animals doing inappropriate things, businesses with double entendres (or typos) in the signs, and lots of evidence that New York City is falling apart at its concrete seams, a fear confirmed by the former traffic commissioner credited with coining the term “gridlock.” It’s all patched together by his voiceover, occasionally droll, occasionally silly, occasionally thoroughly serious.

Were The History of Concrete merely Wilson’s tongue-in-cheek version of an educational film, it would be satisfying, but his thematic preoccupations are as crucial as his visual ones. Concrete is concrete, but it’s a paved gateway to talk about permanence at a moment that Wilson’s life felt particularly impermanent, which things society preserves and which we allow to crack and crumble. It becomes a documentary about architecture, urban planning and, finally, mortality. Death runs through The History of Concrete, in ways that are patently absurd and perhaps a little heartbreaking.

More than anything, in a medium that often asks viewers to sit down knowing exactly where a documentary ends, exactly the points the filmmakers are trying to make, exactly the emotional response that’s being demanded, John Wilson tells stories in which the destination and every stop along the way are revelations of the ordinary.