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| Grade: B- |
*This review was originally published at The Movie Mezzanine.
There is a conundrum that film critics often face while writing about documentary cinema: although form and content are perhaps more easily separable in documentary films, they are also significantly easier to conflate in criticism. Meaning fiction films are regularly dismissed for unassuming presentation of content, but documentaries get a free pass if their subject matter is moving or important or fascinating as a separate entity from the film itself. Clichéd formal practices are often forgiven if the material piques our interest.
Finding Vivian Maier is the most recent case of a documentary film that coasts purely on the force of its enigmatic subject, rendering it in effect impossible to judge the film on any merit beyond the power of the mysterious woman it tries to solve. The titular artist, a New York-born woman of European heritage, spent nearly four decades of her life as a nanny in Chicago and New York.
To the families she lives with, she was known for her obsessive interest in street photography and the enormous number of boxes she hid in her room. Yet, no one had ever had the opportunity to glance at any of these photographs. Vivian’s massive collection of boxes – in which she kept everything from pawnshop receipts to small earrings to newspapers, was rediscovered when John Maloof, a Chicago historian happened to buy one of them for an art project at an auction.
