Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
How to With John Wilson, a junk-drawer wonder of a show that ran for three Peak TV seasons on HBO, never actually set out to teach its viewers anything. The instructional promise of each episode was a bit, a starting point for discursive, funny, intermittently personal mini-essays that always started in Wilson’s beloved New York, but could and did make their way anywhere. Wilson, an unassuming 30-something Ridgewood resident who narrates his work in halting voice-over and never seems to be without a camera in his hand, would kick off an episode called “How to Clean Your Ears” by undergoing a wax removal that improved his hearing to a distracting degree and somehow end it in a West Virginia enclave in the shadow of a telescope that’s full of people who claim to be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields. Mundane premises like “How to Watch Birds” or “How to Appreciate Wine” served as the framework for explorations of everything from documentary ethics to the nature of belonging.
Still, even by Wilson’s standards, the stated subject matter of The History of Concrete is the equivalent of strapping on a weighted vest before setting off to run a marathon — a test of whether the filmmaker’s deceptively meandering format can handle the driest possible topic. That’s not just a sense I got when watching Wilson’s first feature-length documentary, which just premiered at Sundance. It’s part of the text for what’s in some ways just a supersize installment of the series and in others an experiment in what happens when the approach that Wilson first developed in short-form videos is allowed to play out over 100 minutes. The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point. Wilson may affect a self-deprecating, fumbling persona, but he’s actually engaged in an incredibly involved act of storytelling that relies on wry montages of street footage, fragments of memoir, and multiple narratives that are Jenga’d together into something resembling a thematic whole.
There are a few points in The History of Concrete where that forward momentum comes close to petering out, as Wilson ponders creativity, impermanence, and what it means to lead a meaningful life. What keeps things going is, fittingly, concrete. While it’s no Architecton, the ponderous documentary from last year that actually was about building materials, The History of Concrete does blow its budget on an early trip to Rome to see still-standing structures made of earlier versions of the stuff. It wanders through a concrete-industry convention that includes a bricklaying competition and frets about the impact of constructing a world out of a substance that starts crumbling after a few decades. Concrete provides a figurative foundation for what could otherwise become an intolerably structureless experience, even if Wilson’s movie also finds its way to the company of a guy who’s made a business out of removing gum from sidewalks, pays tribute to the short-lived Bed–Stuy Aquarium, and stops by the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, in which competitors spend several weeks running thousands of laps around a single city block in Queens.
The History of Concrete is more of a movie about trying to make a movie about concrete than it is one about what you get when you mix cement, water, and additives. But concrete is something it’s able to return to when it’s in danger of losing the thread — if there even is a thread to lose. Wilson’s whole deal might best be summed up as an ongoing riff on the absurdity of living and trying to make art in capitalism. The premise of this new movie offers the easy layup of footage of Zoom meetings in which Wilson and his collaborators talk to an agent who’s increasingly incapable of pretending there’s anything commercially viable about their proposition. (One of the repeated jokes is that Wilson’s subjects keep throwing out terms like segment and presentation to describe what they’ve been enlisted to film, as though the whole world has become savvier and more self-aware about content than the director.)
Early on, after acknowledging the loose end Wilson finds himself at after the end of How to — he’s achieved a niche renown and no longer has access to the production resources that were once at his disposal — the film trudges to a class about writing Hallmark movies, where Wilson tries to glean wisdom from the most formula-driven of formats. But while his own work is marked by coincidences and unexpected bookends, some provided by the universe and some engineered by the filmmaker, at its core, it’s defined by an unswerving faith in the boundless eccentricities and fascinating fixations of other people. Wilson is forever being distracted from whatever his declared mission may be, though not because of a lack of focus. It’s because, in ways that are ultimately hilarious and moving, other people prove just too interesting — even when they work with concrete.
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