Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

Directed by Michel Gondry

(Not rated)

****

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The word “unusual” doesn’t begin to describe “this most unconventional of films,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. An “intellectually and visually groundbreaking” documentary, it consists entirely of a long conversation that director Michel Gondry had with renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, plus hand-drawn animation that illustrates Chomsky’s ideas along the way. Chomsky spoke mostly about how language affects the way people think and feel, and it’s “mesmerizing” just hearing him riff on the structure of the seven-word question that gives the movie its title. “Imagine a doozy of an office-hours audience with the best professor you never had,” the whole thing “set inside a kaleidoscopic light board of a shared mind-space,” said Alan Scherstuhl in The Village Voice. The “pulsing, mercurial” cartoons somehow clarify many of Chomsky’s ideas, though even Gondry admits being unable to fully keep up. “The point, of course, is to get lost,” said Keith Uhlich in Time Out New York. “To be perpetually befuddled,” this film suggests, is one of the great gifts of being alive.