MAYA LIN: A STRONG CLEAR VISION. Written and directed by Freida Lee Mock. An Ocean Releasing film. At the Kendall Square.

It's tempting, with a documentary like Freida Lee Mock's Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, to excuse the film's flaws because the subject is so engaging. It seems almost petty to point out that Mock's tribute glaringly lacks the clarity of vision it praises in Lin. Nonetheless, for all the movie's nobility of purpose, and for all the compelling nature of the artist's story, Maya Lin lacks focus and is often frustratingly vague. Mock recounts more than you ever wanted to know about Lin's career; Lin herself offers plenty of testimony. Yet the film fails to probe into what drives Lin as a person, as an artist, and as an interpreter of our social history.

Viewers will probably be most interested in the story behind the Vietnam memorial, and here Mock does not disappoint. Lin recalls that, as an undergraduate at Yale, she entered the nationwide design contest as a class project, little knowing that her submission would be selected over 1440 others. She became the target of right-wing opposition to the design, facing down demagoguery from such usual suspects as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot that focused on her youth, sex, and Asian parentage. Although the selection committee ultimately compromised by adding a more traditional statue of soldiers to the hill opposite the memorial, the wall of names was built as Lin planned it. Since it was unveiled in 1982, the astonishingly simple yet powerful monument has become one of the most beloved attractions in Washington. It is also one of the most moving, as Mock demonstrates in the opening and closing moments of the film, with crying veterans and civilians paying homage to the fallen.

Mock tells the story behind the memorial first; the rest of the movie is left to meander anticlimactically. She takes us on an endless travelogue through Lin's résumé, with a detour in the middle to revisit the artist's apparently blissful, middle-class childhood. Lin grew up in a house near a wooded area in Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio University, where her parents, both émigrés from China, were professors. Mock wastes the opportunity to explore the possible effects of Lin's background, to see whether this isolated house influenced her ideas about nature and space, or whether she felt any sense of difference that might have motivated her in designing so many monuments that bring people together.

Maya Lin arrives bearing an unfortunate whiff of controversy because it won the Academy Award this year for Best Documentary Feature, in a contest so disputed that it resulted in a change in the rules. The nominating committee, charged in the past with being out of touch for ignoring the likes of Shoah, Roger & Me, and Paris Is Burning, was accused of cronyism this year when Mock's film was nominated in place of such apparent shoo-ins as Hoop Dreams and Crumb. Mock had headed the committee for the past two years, though she recused herself this year from the chair. One committee member later revealed that voters had been discouraged from nominating Hoop Dreams precisely because it was so likely to win. After Maya Lin took the Oscar, the Academy announced some largely cosmetic rule changes that should at least curtail the politicking that used to precede the initial voting.

It's not clear that the committee nominated Maya Lin simply because it was Mock's movie. Certainly the first 20 minutes (and the closing five) are as strong and worthy as any recent documentary. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue that the film as a whole is better than Hoop Dreams or Crumb, or even better than such fellow nominees as A Great Day in Harlem and Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter. It's too bad that the movie has been tainted by scandal; it deserves better than to be handled so clumsily. Then, again, so does Maya Lin herself.