At a Canadian dive bar, the man pouring the drinks knew the recipe. The concrete of ancient Rome, rendered sturdy and self-repairing through a very particular limestone heating process, is the reason so many imperial mega-structures are still standing. The distinction matters here only because the filmmaker John Wilson flew to Italy for his first feature in search of the same information, spoke none of the language, and came home instead with footage of peculiar McDonald’s and of how swiftly a wax museum had absorbed artificial intelligence. The detours, as the critic Zack Kotzer writes for Kotaku after an advance screening, have always been the point. The bartender was simply a cheaper route.
The film is The History of Concrete, Wilson’s big-screen debut after the acclaimed HBO series How To with John Wilson, in which a stated question — how to watch sports, how to choose wine for a dinner party — led wherever it led: to a vacuum-cleaner Olympics, to the Florida compound of a charismatic energy-drink mogul. The new movie sets out from a double problem. Wilson no longer has his television show, and he does not know what his documentary should be about. Then his house provides an answer: the foundation fissures, his patch of the leak persuades no one, and he resolves to learn about, perhaps even to master, the substance on which modern civilisation rests.
What follows, in Kotzer’s inventory, is a tour of the strange, the uncanny and the very funny. Wilson shadows a chewing-gum removal specialist and samples the man’s in-house wine label. He keeps pace with a spiritualist jogging movement that circles one city block for two uninterrupted months. He attends a concrete trade show in Las Vegas at which niche futurists sketch how cement will be mixed on the Moon. In between come NIMBYs, civil servants, Hallmark Channel producers, teenagers and tattoo artists, all enlisted — knowingly or not — in the film’s other project, which is figuring out how to sell itself.
The method, carried over from the series, is picaresque: visual verse assembled from unstaged New York minutes. Concrete turns out to be the right load-bearing metaphor. The Roman kind mends itself; the modern equivalent shows its age within a few years. It fractures, it fissures, and the repairs leave gashes and scars, buildings stapled back together with rusted bolts and packing tape. Vulgar, ubiquitous and mostly unregistered, the effect accumulates, Kotzer writes, into the sensation that things are crumbling underfoot.
The review files its reservations honestly. As an introduction to Wilson’s world, the film is a poor one; the ribbon that usually ties his wanderings together goes missing, particularly once a local metal singer with an oddly high-profile fiancé begins to absorb his attention. But the paradoxes hold. An acclaimed documentarian dines across from Kardashians while his royalty checks fail to cover the dipping sauce. A community that refuses to sacrifice a blade of grass for Tony Hawk’s public skate park somehow grows and thrives. Compile the atrophy and the riddle dissolves: the question is how to trust the future, and get excited about the new, when the existing foundation is straining. The limestone, meanwhile, keeps quietly fixing itself.