MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Maya Lin’: Fit for the Discovery Channel

The case against the parochialism of the documentary committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not been made better by its critics than it was by the committee itself in presenting the Oscar this year to abstaining chairwoman Freida Lee Mock’s totally unremarkable “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.”

With the committee’s snub of “Hoop Dreams” still the ranking embarrassment of the year in Hollywood, we finally get a look at the winner and what we see is a film that should have gone directly to the Discovery Channel or been pared down for the one-hour format of “A&E;’s Biography.”

No disrespect to Maya Lin, the gifted Chinese American architect and sculptor who, as a 20-year-old Yale undergraduate, submitted the winning design for the Vietnam Memorial in 1980. Hers was chosen from 1,400 entries, by a panel of professionals evaluating them without knowing the designers’ identities, and it resulted in one of the nation’s most inspirational and frequently visited monuments.

How Lin came up with the design for a class project, submitted it to the national competition as an afterthought and then weathered the storm of protest and racist taunts from some angry Vietnam veterans is a terrific story, and recapping it with the reflections of Lin 15 years later gives the documentary noble purpose.

We also learn a good deal about how art connects to the national psyche, and how smart the judges on that panel were. While many of the professional architects and designers sent in sculpted models, three-dimensional drawings and detailed blueprints, Lin submitted simple pastel impressions, with her monument standing out as an angled black stripe against a blue-green field. With that, and the essay she spent two months writing, the judges divined a work of genius, and were proven right.

But “Maya Lin” is only compelling while focused on the Vietnam Memorial, which takes up perhaps a third of its one-hour, 45-minute running time. The rest details the work Lin has done since and takes a cursory look at her background, growing up with her well-educated Chinese immigrant parents in the rural Midwest. The most pertinent information there is that the hills and woods surrounding her home provided the inspiration for Lin’s ecology-friendly architectural aesthetic.

The only thing Lin has done that approaches the psychological power of the Vietnam Memorial is her fountain design for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. The other pieces we see her working on--a crushed-glass sculpture garden, a wavy-roofed house, the Peace Chapel at Juniata College in Pennsylvania--seem, in comparison, to be self-indulgent and slight.

The film’s problems, however, are journalistic. Mock includes news footage of Vietnam veterans spokesman Tom Carhart’s 1980 press conference outburst, during which--with Lin looking on sadly and a little cowed--he called her design a “black scar” and an insult to veterans. The protest was taken up by others, and the plan nearly abandoned.

Has time and the memorial’s impact tempered the views of its original critics? The movie calls out for an answer that Mock never provides.

Finally, “Maya Lin” is not even particularly compelling to look at. Scenes of Vietnam veterans weeping at the memorial are always moving, whether in this film or in annual Memorial Day news coverage. But Mock was unable to capture the visual power of the monument itself. Or of the fountain in Montgomery. Hers is simply the most fundamental kind of documentary filmmaking, absent any poetic sense or social point-of-view of its own.

In the end, “Maya Lin” is less a portrait of the artist than an admiring tribute, fit for a dinner when her magnificent wall celebrates its 20th anniversary. The only explanation for its Oscar victory is that the documentary committee members confused the quality of the film with the quality of its subject.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: The film contains nothing objectionable. ‘Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision’

A Sanders & Mock production, released by Ocean Releasing. Writer-director-producer Freida Lee Mock. Co-producer Terry Sanders. Cinematography by Don Lenzer, Eddie Marritz. Editor William T. Cartwright, Sr. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

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