I must confess I’ve never seen the much-lauded HBO series How To with John Wilson, but after watching The History of Concrete, I definitely feel compelled to do so. From what I understand, this film is a lot like Wilson’s show: the documentary filmmaker starts out with a particular topic and is in the frame of mind to give advice or educational material on said topic, but also deals with personal issues and finds insightful anecdotes while doing so. Here, those anecdotes tend to feel like tangents, but that’s not always a bad thing. Though they do tend to step outside of concrete, Wilson’s purported topic, they are the glue — or sand, cement, water; take your pick — that winds up holding the film together.
To be fair, concrete isn’t exactly the sexiest of topics for a documentary, as Wilson himself pokes fun at while chronicling his struggles getting the movie financed. Therefore, the film’s scope almost necessitates thematic expansion. We follow Wilson’s deadpan, subtly hilarious and profound ways of relating his tangents back to concrete and its similarities to and involvement in the deterioration of our physical and social infrastructure. It’s the type of unhurried, observational documentary filmmaking in which questions like “[…] you know where Chef Boyardee’s buried?” are actually answered in profound ways which still deliver laughs. Other tangents include an apartment which has become an underground music venue at which a perfectly-crushed beer can has sat naturally holding on to a shelf for two years, and a concrete professionals convention at which a man fondles the breasts of a concrete statue of a female body when he thinks no one is looking. If you know Wilson’s work, perhaps it won’t surprise you to read that all of these quirky moments and more are effortlessly related back to Wilson’s thesis about concrete as a big part of and a stand-in for a slew of societal woes.
Although the film can feel a bit aimless at times due to these random moments, Wilson does ultimately bring the good ship Concrete into harbor by focusing on concrete’s major role in the respective infrastructures of New York City and Los Angeles. He points out that the major difference between the two cities is that in New York, the pedestrian is king, as opposed to the car out west. This idea flows into a dissection of affordable housing policy, and housing policy period. However, the film never tells us how to feel about what’s being decided, nor what exactly to decide. The identification and interrogation of the problem is definitely from a left-of-center perspective, but the film is very rarely didactic in any way. Coupled with the context Wilson has provided, his showcasing of the vote to pass former NYC mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” initiative for affordable housing leaves the viewer perplexed and intrigued at just how many sides there can be to an issue like this, especially when it’s informed by the crumbling concrete in many areas of the city. One sequence involving a highway overhang legitimately terrified me after one of Wilson’s interviewees explained the risks involved in its design and use. Concrete is literally all around us. How much crumbling are we willing to accept?
The History of Concrete is a film which in certain contexts might be capable of enraging viewers, but broadly speaking, Wilson obviously went for engaging rather than enraging. In this case, a spoonful of sugar definitely helps the medicine go down, even when that medicine is existential and not just infrastructural. | George Napper
