Michel Gondry’s (“The Green Hornet”) documentary about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, as well as semiotician and linguist, Noam Chomsky is particularly crazy, albeit charmingly crazy.
Much of what consists of “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is doodles. Gondry probes for answers about various topics from generative grammar to visual recognition and how language is endowed through time. He asks questions such as ‘where does the conception of speech comes from?’ and ‘How do people recognize signs in books and then can identify those objects in life?’ These two hour conversations are doodled and they often display splendid illusory light shows of all the concepts Chomsky talks about.
Sometimes Gondry’s questions become lost in translation as he trips over his pronunciations of the English language —- most notably in a conversation about how one can identify a dog if it is not a dog, but does it stay a dog —- and the flow of the conversation moves to whatever it generally feels like. Not too dissimilar with “My Dinner with Andre,” Chomsky is a digressive and didactic speaker, but Gondry is a curious listener.
Gondry does find delicate moments which we get to see Chomsky in a humbling light; talking about his childhood when his father would read to him classics, how he set his path toward parsing down elements of grammar and his late wife Carol.
Much of “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” has a mode of communication, but is untethered from a purpose which makes the film frustratingly listlesses. Chomsky is amused by Gondry’s antique 16mm camera and the skittering and whimsy of the way they are often struggling to keep up with each other when Chomsky swiftly chats about his topics.
Gondry’s “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” evokes the whimsy of “The Science of Sleep” and “Be Kind Rewind.” He’s endlessly working away at the animation table and we see the similar frustration that Gondry has with trying to describe Chomsky’s theories and at one point he does the visual equivalent of throwing up his hands and letting the film run on its own for a while with recycled animations.
The portrait of Chomsky in “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is largely incomplete. Absent is any discussion about the political philosophy and his writings which have retained quite a bit of controversy. Gondry doesn’t seem interested much in it though. He’s more fascinated in finding the proffered question, itself a debauched version of a different question posed by Gondry during one of their discussions, which is essentially what does the imagination of a man who seems to have everything in knowledge look like.
Gondry’s film attempts to take the viewer there, but he gets a little absentminded along the way, abstractly doodling his head all the way to the clouds.
dkahen-kashi@theeagleonline.com
