‘The History of Concrete’ Review

If you’ve ever looked at the strange and serendipitous patterns cast by a shadow, or thought deeply about the life stories that come before every stranger on the sidewalk, or if you’ve ever caught yourself reading about an obscure person or company on a multi-hour Wikipedia binge, then you’ve seen the world as John Wilson sees it. At least, you’ve seen the world as Wilson filmed it on his HBO show “How To with,” well, “John Wilson.” 

Across its three seasons, “How To” wove its own idiosyncratic vision of Wilson’s native New York City from hours upon hours of B-roll shot by the filmmaker. While ostensibly taking on the form of 25-minute tutorials, Wilson constantly found himself either touching deeply personal topics or showing up at far-flung, hilariously off-topic places. None of it ever makes complete sense as anything other than comedy, but watching multiple episodes gives the viewer a particular kaleidoscopic view of the world around them. 

Wilson, for his part, takes on the role of an omniscient narrator, serving as the viewer’s personal monologue over his wandering eye. An episode may start with Wilson trying to cook risotto for his landlord, in one particularly memorable example, and then pivot to him trying to cope with the then-recent Covid pandemic. He then mixes his two or more plot threads with his own dryly humorous, almost naive comedic persona. The end result is something particular and special, and, in essence, a documentary second and a comedy first, in a way close to the distinctive style of Nathan Fielder, a co-producer of the show. 

Of course, “How To” is not the movie at hand, as the show ended a few years ago. Instead, Wilson has a new project, “The History of Concrete,” which picks up right where his show left off. I spent so much space writing on the show for the simple reason that “Concrete” is almost impossible to view on its own terms; it’s less a new thing and more of a feature-length adaptation. Think “Mission: Impossible,” except with fewer shots of Tom Cruise running and more shots of a man shooting gum on the street with a pressurized machine. In fact, much of the theming, topics chosen, and filming dates suggest that Wilson intended this specifically as a Christmas special. As a result, there are two largely divergent ways of viewing this movie as an audience. 

The first is as someone who is already familiar with the show, which was my personal experience. This person knows exactly what they are getting into, already has experience with Wilson’s creative persona, and can steel themselves for the turns that the movie inevitably takes. I can almost guarantee that this person will like “Concrete,” except they won’t necessarily find something new or revelatory. Wilson seems content to leave his adaptation as a simple translation into a new medium. “Concrete” is just another tutorial, just 101 minutes long instead of 25. 

But that is precisely the issue for me, in my little subset of this half of the demographic. Watching “How To” was, for me, an exercise in learning not to binge-watch a show. Sure, every episode had some amount of humor, some amount of clever editing, and some amount of surprising poignancy, but every episode grated against me by the end of it. I could only ever watch one episode at a time before I got tired of the granular investigations and Wilson’s style. 

Unfortunately, “Concrete” essentially forces you to binge multiple “How To” episodes, and not just because it is the length of four of them combined. Wilson cuts the movie as if it were multiple episodes shoved together, with potential titles like “How to Make a Hallmark Movie,” or “How to Be a Famous Musician,” or “How to Make a Documentary About the History of Concrete.” Watching all of his footage together is impressive, but I can’t escape the feeling that I would rather watch all the episodes independently over at least a couple of days.

But there is another way to view this movie, and given the low ratings of “How To” on HBO, it is likely the more common way to see it. Going into the film completely blind can be both an invigorating experience and an absolutely stupefying one. Those unacquainted with Wilson’s rhythms and themes will find them well articulated and wonderful for the entire runtime, but if you aren’t on board with him, he doesn’t try particularly hard to convince you. The purposefully obtuse title doesn’t do any favors: those looking for a Ken Burns-style documentary on the titular substance will find approximately three minutes of actually worthwhile material, surrounded by the meanderings that are the real point.

Both of these routes — the one I took and the one I did not — are very surface-level, and it’s almost hard not to view the entire film that way. It’s a pointless movie about pointless things, so why ask Wilson what the point is? Why not just take the face value experience? And why have I not, after over 800 words, actually articulated what the movie is really about, beyond concrete?

Deep down, though, there is a deeper point to Wilson’s quirky madness, and it all boils down to the surface-level experience of watching it. If I were to walk you through what happens, if I were to describe the way that the film pivots from concrete to gumbusting to a 50-day race around a single block in Queens to a GQ party with some insane cameos and all the way back again, you would walk away with almost nothing of what Wilson wants you to actually see. The joy in the film is in the associative connection between the topics: To tell the history of concrete, the history of anything, you need to know about everything else first.

Wilson’s mission in “How To” and “Concrete” has occasionally been accused of being cruel; his camera jeers at those strange and unlucky souls who invite him in or, worse, get picked up incidentally on the B-roll. But to think of him as purely pointing and laughing is myopic — a symptom of how much pointing and laughing we see online every day. Wilson wants to point, laugh, and make you think about the humanity of the people on the other side, and that can only be accomplished by viewing them all at once, together. Really, he is a documentarian third, a comedian second, and a humanist first.

Toward the end of the movie, a typically strange sequence with one of Wilson’s regular subjects gets derailed by the news that the subject’s fiancee died. Here, Wilson intentionally peels back the limits of his associative structure, acknowledging that she is someone “who you [the viewer] didn’t even know existed,” as her story didn’t need to be told before. Now, though, things have changed. In a true Wilsonian digression, he tells it, letting her be seen amidst his mess. Then, he goes back to concrete, the foundation for the entire project. Even if his stories aren’t perfect, even if they do get old, I hope that Wilson keeps telling stories in this way. No one else can capture his precise blend of empathy, humor, and minute detail, and we need the eye of his ever-noticing camera to continue connecting the dots into something more, something simple, and something beautiful.