‘The History of Concrete’ Review: John Wilson Cements Status as an Essential Artist for Our Uncertain Times

How does one introduce a man like John Wilson to those unfamiliar with him? Well, to start, among many things, he’s a rather awkward fellow, a talented filmmaker, and a lover of people. Above all else, though, he’s an artist. 

He’s a deeply, often profoundly strange one, who speaks as if he’s nervous about his own ideas that he stumbles upon over the course of his work, but an artist he remains. From his clever initial shorts to his spectacular HBO series “How To With John Wilson,” he’s a filmmaker of boundless, creative humor — and uniquely observant. That series found him digging into a premise as a documentarian, then getting distracted — purposefully so — by the mundanity of everyday life, finding subjects and shots you wouldn’t dare predict. An episode about wine famously found Wilson interviewing a man who collects and eats expired World War II ration kits.

He’s an artist who defies expectations with each camera move, sardonic voiceover, precise cut and earnestly awkward interview. Even as he’s worked with those like Nathan Fielder, he’s carved out a place as a documentarian of American life without compare. 

Nowhere is this more true than with his feature directorial debut “The History of Concrete.” Though an extension of the same tone that was experienced in his HBO series, this feature is more than just one very long episode of his show. Instead, it’s like Wilson has fully become a funnier, more frenetic version of Frederick Wiseman. Though nowhere near as long as that director’s films, “The History of Concrete” maintains a similar interest in exploring the little details of life that accumulate into something significant.

Picking right back up where his show ended, we come to understand how Wilson is feeling adrift and uncertain about what he should do next. While “How To With John Wilson” was still smaller in scale, it had resources and support that he lacks as he makes an independent documentary film. So what does a man like Wilson do? Well, what he knows best: pick up a camera. What he then creates is his most unexpectedly moving, though still plenty ridiculous, portrait of his fellow strange people making their way through a world that can feel like it’s crumbling beneath their feet. 

For Wilson, the questions he must face involve whether the world has grown hostile to his art. Even when he has been getting offers to fund and release his film, it seems most partners want to use him to make advertisements for them. What place will he have when, as we see in one moment, AI has been trained on his voice to sell ads without him even involved? How can less traditional yet still inventive documentaries find a place in this market?

Just as “The History of Concrete” mines humor from these tragic developments, it also provides an incisive look at how even someone like Wilson, who has gained some degree of recognition, may struggle to get his work out there. Yet even as his options for support may have narrowed, he doesn’t sacrifice one iota of his eccentricities in how he approaches this feature. If anything, he goes deeper than ever before.

The particulars of this initially involve the filmmaker going to a hilarious yet helpful seminar put on by the WGA during the strike on how to make a Hallmark movie. Wilson being Wilson, he decides he will use the outline of this formula to attempt to make a movie about concrete. Or to be more specific, a film about the often unseen ways concrete is part of our daily lives. As it turns out, it’s not exactly easy to get funding for something like this, and Wilson soon finds that making art that isn’t easy to explain can be a lonely endeavor. Yet on he goes, cutting together fragments of our world into a collage that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. 

Much of this is classic Wilson, with strange connections that come out of nowhere eliciting laughs of earnest surprise and joy. Whether it is when we catch a glimpse of the production of “Marty Supreme” or turn to see Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson at a party you’d never expect them to be at, “The History of Concrete” is always keeping you on your toes. But the greater emotional beats come in how Wilson tries to make sense of the things he encounters, offering reflections that reveal the filmmaker’s uncertainty.

Sometimes, this teeters on the edge of feeling scattered or sporadic. Indeed, there are a couple of moments where you wonder if Wilson just wanted to leave something in because of how strange it is or, as he acknowledged in his show, if there was something more constructed about it than we realize. However, when the film makes an unexpected shift into confronting both the fragility of life and our proximity to death, you see every piece falling into place.

This could sound ridiculous to those unfamiliar with the work of Wilson, and the film is very much not for everyone. But for those who find themselves on the same wavelength as this strange artist trying to make something new when it seems like much of everything is dying around him, you’ll see he found slivers of life in his camera despite it all.

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