According to Grist, John Wilson’s new feature-length documentary The History of Concrete uses the ubiquitous material as a springboard for a meandering tour of odd corners of American life. The film is styled like a Hallmark movie and shares the deadpan, handheld aesthetic of Wilson’s HBO series How To with John Wilson. But beneath the absurdity, the subject is serious: concrete is the second-most used material on Earth and the third biggest contributor to global warming.
Wilson’s interest began with a recurring leak in his Queens apartment basement that he could not patch with store-bought concrete mix. That frustration, Grist notes, is widely shared. As climate change intensifies storms and raises sea levels, New Yorkers face more extreme rainfall and coastal flooding. Concrete makes the problem worse by preventing stormwater from soaking into the soil, and once it cracks it fails to keep water out of subway stations and buildings for dozens of days a year.
Grist cautions that the documentary is not really a climate film, and it would be a stretch to call it one. Yet its wandering vignettes—from a tattoo-preservation mortuary to a 3,100-mile race around a Queens block—keep returning to an unfolding environmental disaster: a material indispensable to modern life that is short-lived, crumbling, and hazardous on a disaster-prone planet.