Finding Vivian Maier

The story of Vivian Maier is the stuff of juicy fiction—a peripatetic career nanny from 1956 until the mid-1990s, Maier was also secretly a masterful street photographer, a mordantly witty chronicler of humanity's fringes. Maier left most of the hundreds of thousands of pictures she shot unexposed, and so her photographic brilliance went unknown until an auction junkie named John Maloof purchased her estate and exposed the frames. Maloof also co-directed this documentary, and while Finding Vivian Maier is of interest as an attempt to unite the strands of Maier's deeply private life, there is also a queasy sense of ownership in Maloof's aim to canonize and define a woman based on some starry-eyed assumptions. It's a slick effort, but removed of any mercenary ambitions, Finding Vivian Maier offers little more than you would get from a Tumblr profile and a Wikipedia page.