‘The History of Concrete’ review: John Wilson adapts to movies

Across its three-season run on HBO, John Wilson’s funny, observant docuseries-cum-tutorial “How to With John Wilson” played like the urban travelogue a complex metropolis such as New York was meant to inspire. Wilson, an anxiously witty host, turned his adventures (covering furniture, mastering small talk, appreciating wine) into fraught mini-epics of connection, in which one’s laughter invariably betrayed a melancholic grace about our tenuous place in the big crazy world.

You wouldn’t expect (or want) his movie-directing debut, “The History of Concrete,” to be any different and it isn’t, beautifully so. A supersizing of the series format, it doesn’t significantly alter the rangy charm of Wilson’s video-captured eccentricities, a sturdy foundation. He was probably destined to find feature-length curiosity in the titular stuff of walkways and structures, the second-most used building material on Earth, since concrete is mundane, ubiquitous and, though seemingly impervious, susceptible to (wise)cracking.

And yet this gray mixture, majestic when deployed by ancient Romans (there’s a brief trip to Rome that depletes his production budget) but ugly when dominating our daily stroll, is also a way for Wilson to address the mirage of permanence and quest for solidity that is modern life. He feels these anxieties personally as an Emmy-nominated documentarian now without a show and looking for his next project. Wilson wonders if his particular termite art — treating street B-roll like a hidden archive of absurd humanity — has a place in the cutthroat film world of today.

On one end of that storytelling commerce spectrum is what’s communicated in a class Wilson takes on how to write Hallmark TV movies (“Trauma is fine if it ends on a high note,” the instructor cheerfully offers), and at the other, an early Zoom pitch for this very documentary. Note the awkward silence after he gives his team the proposed name. (At least that stayed.)

Concrete is also a sly portal into tackling perhaps the biggest issue in New York and everywhere: affordable housing. Wilson doesn’t pretend to unlock any answers but his coverage of various promoted developments, political solutions and fervid community protests is proof that the road to civil progress is harder to set than any slab of you-know-what. A dangerously nondurable kind of concrete was used for a recently built skyscraper that is already crumbling from the inside. Oops?

I’m loath to synopsize “The History of Concrete.” The gravitational joy of Wilson’s comic approach is watching how he follows his instincts and later applies his own sui generis mortar to the assembled vérité blocks. I don’t mind teasing, however, that along the way you will encounter a faintly disturbing memorial business, get a new appreciation for public pool management and maybe wonder why you don’t get to go to a kooky convention every year. He also discovers the unlikeliest of love stories, making the appealingly discursive, touchingly oddball “History” feel like a bent, colorful flower poking out of the pavement.

Across its three-season run on HBO, John Wilson’s funny, observant docuseries-cum-tutorial “How to With John Wilson” played like the urban travelogue a complex metropolis such as New York was meant to inspire. Wilson, an anxiously witty host, turned his adventures (covering furniture, mastering small talk, appreciating wine) into fraught mini-epics of connection, in which one’s laughter invariably betrayed a melancholic grace about our tenuous place in the big crazy world.

You wouldn’t expect (or want) his movie-directing debut, “The History of Concrete,” to be any different and it isn’t, beautifully so. A supersizing of the series format, it doesn’t significantly alter the rangy charm of Wilson’s video-captured eccentricities, a sturdy foundation. He was probably destined to find feature-length curiosity in the titular stuff of walkways and structures, the second-most used building material on Earth, since concrete is mundane, ubiquitous and, though seemingly impervious, susceptible to (wise)cracking.

And yet this gray mixture, majestic when deployed by ancient Romans (there’s a brief trip to Rome that depletes his production budget) but ugly when dominating our daily stroll, is also a way for Wilson to address the mirage of permanence and quest for solidity that is modern life. He feels these anxieties personally as an Emmy-nominated documentarian now without a show and looking for his next project. Wilson wonders if his particular termite art — treating street B-roll like a hidden archive of absurd humanity — has a place in the cutthroat film world of today.

On one end of that storytelling commerce spectrum is what’s communicated in a class Wilson takes on how to write Hallmark TV movies (“Trauma is fine if it ends on a high note,” the instructor cheerfully offers), and at the other, an early Zoom pitch for this very documentary. Note the awkward silence after he gives his team the proposed name. (At least that stayed.)

Concrete is also a sly portal into tackling perhaps the biggest issue in New York and everywhere: affordable housing. Wilson doesn’t pretend to unlock any answers but his coverage of various promoted developments, political solutions and fervid community protests is proof that the road to civil progress is harder to set than any slab of you-know-what. A dangerously nondurable kind of concrete was used for a recently built skyscraper that is already crumbling from the inside. Oops?

I’m loath to synopsize “The History of Concrete.” The gravitational joy of Wilson’s comic approach is watching how he follows his instincts and later applies his own sui generis mortar to the assembled vérité blocks. I don’t mind teasing, however, that along the way you will encounter a faintly disturbing memorial business, get a new appreciation for public pool management and maybe wonder why you don’t get to go to a kooky convention every year. He also discovers the unlikeliest of love stories, making the appealingly discursive, touchingly oddball “History” feel like a bent, colorful flower poking out of the pavement.