"The History of Concrete"

 ☆☆½

Believe me, I know what it looks like from the outside to see me with a book or a magazine or—far, far worse, I think—my phone. My husband tells me often: I get too absorbed. I've always been that way, from the moment I could read (at age 3, allegedly, my parents claim): when the term "rabbit hole" was used only to describe where Alice went, I fell down them constantly.

Cereal boxes, Yellow Pages, TV listings, classified ads, Reader's Digests, whatever I had at hand was good enough for me to read, which I did, constantly. The summer my mom volunteered me to clean up a neighbor's home stacked with old newspapers, no one realized the end result would be that I read them much more than I threw them away.

All of which made me, I thought, an ideal audience for John Wilson's documentary The History of Concrete, which I knew purported to be almost anything but. I assumed Wilson, in his funny, nasally voice, would begin in one place and much, much, much later wind up somewhere so entirely different that the result would be fascinating for a non-linear, information-absorbing brain like mine.

Indeed, the movie does exactly that, tracing a long, circuitous route of facts, weirdnesses and odd personalities to get wherever it might or might not be going. The trouble is, none of it is particularly fascinating.

Over on Letterboxd (I'd be happy if you followed me), I gave The History of Concrete three stars the night I saw it, when I felt a little more pleased with it than I turned out to be. Sometimes it takes a while to know how a film is going to work on you, or if it's going to work on you. And that was the problem with The History of Concrete: the morning after seeing it, I forgot about it. I forgot even to write this review.

It's all a little too smug, a little too pleased with itself as it careens from one idea to the next. James Burke famously did that in the 1970s series Connections (to start you down your own rabbit hole, here's that series on YouTube, but don't say I didn't warn you). The brilliant writer Susan Orlean did it in her astonishing, revelatory book The Library Book, which claims to be about a fire at the Los Angeles Public Library and turns out to be about libraries and, well, a whole lot of other things. Like, a dizzying array of other things.

That's a little of what I hoped The History of Concrete might be. Alas, it's not like those things. It's scattershot. It's flippant. It finds an interesting subject then goes out of its way to avoid it. Yes, it ends up in quite an odd place, chronicling the loves and losses of a cover-band singer, but it feels arbitrary and forced.

Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's even intriguing and disturbing, like when it veers into the strange world of tattoo preservation — actually preserving a dead person's skin and the tattoo that was on it. And that winds up in a place that might make The Golden Girls' Sophia Petrillo cry: talking about the death of Chef Boyardee.

If The History of Concrete had trusted itself more to be genuinely curious about these subjects and where they led, it might have been worth the effort. As such, it may wind up playing much better on TV than in the movie theater. In the movie theater, we're stuck watching it all unfold. I'm usually one of the world's biggest proponents of seeing movies in a movie theater for precisely the reason that betrays The History of Concrete: you have to watch. Or go to sleep. Or leave. The choices are limited, unless you have no manners. (And let's not get into that right now.)

But on TV, on streaming, you'll be able to sit there with phone in hand, Googling everything Wilson says, falling down your own rabbit holes while paying half-attention to this documentary that should have been a lot better. So, when it's on streaming, do watch it. You may learn something. Just likely not from the movie.

Viewed October 3, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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