“The History of Concrete” opens Friday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema for an eight-screening run through Thursday, Oct. 8, with six performances followed by a prerecorded conversation between director John Wilson and filmmaker Josh Safdie.
A Hallmark formula meets concrete
Wilson built his reputation on HBO’s “How To with John Wilson,” a three-season docuseries that paired his hesitant, deadpan narration with an enormous archive of New York street footage. Episodes that ostensibly began with subjects such as making small talk or splitting a restaurant check routinely wandered into much stranger territory.
“The History of Concrete,” his first feature film, takes the same sensibility and points it toward one of the least glamorous subjects imaginable.
The premise begins after Wilson attends a workshop on writing and selling Hallmark movies. He decides to apply the same commercial formula to a documentary about concrete, hoping the familiar structure might make an apparently unmarketable subject easier to sell.
It does not go according to plan.
As Wilson tries to make the definitive concrete documentary, the film begins wandering in directions that will feel familiar to viewers of his HBO series. He travels to Rome to look at ancient concrete, visits the oldest concrete street in Ohio and spends time with a man whose business removes chewing gum from New York sidewalks. One detour leads to a company that preserves tattoos cut from the skin of people after they die.
The farther Wilson travels from his original premise, the more the movie becomes about something larger than building material: permanence, deterioration, preservation and the difficulty of making art according to somebody else’s formula.
Famous faces among the detours
Wilson’s camera also encounters a surprisingly recognizable collection of people along the way.
Timothée Chalamet, Nathan Fielder, Michael Imperioli and Josh Safdie are among those who appear in the film, with other celebrity encounters emerging almost incidentally from Wilson’s wandering approach. Safdie also served as an executive producer.
Safdie, known for directing “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time” with his brother Benny, joins Wilson in the prerecorded Q&A accompanying six of the Coral Gables screenings.
That pairing makes sense. Fielder was an executive producer of “How To with John Wilson,” while Safdie belongs to a neighboring strain of New York filmmaking that often blurs documentary observation, performance and uncomfortable comedy.
From Sundance to Coral Gables
“The History of Concrete” had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and later received its international premiere at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX. Magnolia Pictures acquired North American distribution rights in March and began its theatrical release Sept. 18.
The film runs 101 minutes and arrives in Coral Gables after strong reviews.
The Guardian called it “an absurd triumph.” The Hollywood Reporter described Wilson as “the Werner Herzog of the mundane,” while Rolling Stone critic David Fear answered the question of whether Wilson’s digressive style could sustain feature length with an emphatic yes.
But the film’s appeal appears to lie less in how much viewers learn about concrete than in what Wilson finds while supposedly looking for it. His investigation moves from sidewalks and infrastructure to artistic ambition, mortality, New York, preservation and the people who devote themselves to things most passersby barely notice.
For longtime fans of “How To with John Wilson,” the movie expands his observational style to feature length without imposing much more order on it. For newcomers, it offers a self-contained introduction to a filmmaker whose specialty is noticing what everyone else walks past.
A documentary about concrete may sound like a difficult sell. Wilson appears to have made that difficulty part of the point.
The Q&A screenings are Friday at 3:30 and 8:30 p.m., Saturday at 3:30 p.m., Sunday at 5:45 p.m., Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. and Thursday at 5:30 p.m. Additional screenings without the Q&A are Friday and Saturday at 1:15 p.m. Tickets are $8 for members and up to $12.75 for nonmembers. Cinema members also avoid online service fees.
