Lee is a passion project that Kate Winslet has been attached to since 2015, it’s easy to see why Lee Miller has fascinated her so. Miller lived many different lives that seem to have nothing to do with one another. She was a fashion model in New York, a Surrealist artist in Paris, and even spent time as a gourmet chef. But it’s her career as a WWII war photographer that has built a lasting legacy, and is the subject of Winslet and director Ellen Kuras’ drama. The film offers Winslet the best big screen role she’s had in far too long for someone of her talent, but as interesting as Miller is, Lee struggles to break the confines of your standard biopic.
Picking up in 1937, we meet Miller as she’s living a spirited, often topless Bohemian lifestyle in Cairo, admittedly indulging in lots of wine-drinking, partying, and sex. Along with her closest friends, Parisian journalist Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and artist Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) hear of the Hitler threat but feel it will never touch them. Miller focuses on shagging her future husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard), who wins her heart and convinces her to move to London.
It’s there that Miller finds new purpose, nagging British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough, great in a small-ish role) into giving her a job. Even then, Miller faces unsubtle misogyny from a male Vogue editor who scoffs at Miller being too old to model (she was around 30 at the time), even though she wasn’t there for that. After too many years adrift, Miller wanted to do something useful again, and found that her talent for photography would be best used sending home images from the battlefront.
Kuras, Winslet’s cinematographer on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and A Little Chaos, knows how to best capture the actress. Winslet is believable as an ex-model whose fearlessness allowed her to transition to the battlefield with apparent ease, going from swanky get-togethers to photographing blood-soaked soldiers in triage, abused and ostracized women having their heads shaved clean, and piles of corpses left behind by Hitler’s troops. She sprints into war zones, her face always covered by a thin layer of grime. Miller’s steely nerves eventually give way to the thousand-mile-stare of someone who has seen too much. Fabulous attention to detail is spent on recreating some of Miller’s most iconic images, of which there were many. We see the staging of the famous 1945 photo of Miller, bathing in Hitler’s bathtub at his Munich flat after Germany’s defeat. Miller’s sensitive depictions of the women affected by war, such as in her “Fire Masks” photo taken at a bomb shelter, were so moving they led Withers to say only a woman could’ve taken them.
In her feature directorial debut, Kuras unfortunately sticks to a paint-by-numbers approach to telling Miller’s story. Like reading the Lee Miller Wikipedia entry in slow motion, the film plods from beat to beat even as Winslet remains a powerhouse force throughout. Even the narrative structure is uninspiring, with the screenplay by Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume (why did this need three writers??) framing it around an interview with Miller and a journalist (Josh O’Connor) later in her life. Those scenes are well-performed but not especially revelatory, and seem to exist just to set up a final-act swerve that anyone knowledgeable about Miller will already know.
While conventionally told, Lee benefits from Winslet’s commanding presence and that of her supporting cast. An entire movie could be built around Cotillard’s Solange d’Ayen and her sad tale, and you could probably do the same for Riseborough’s Withers and her struggles to tell the truth of WWII to a readership that would rather stay ignorant of it. The casting of Andy Samberg as David E Sherman, a Jewish-American photojournalist who accompanied Miller, comes out of left field. Sherman is another whose varied existence deserves more than a background role, but Samberg is solid in a rare dramatic performance.
Clearly designed to be a major factor this awards season, one can easily see how Lee might fit in that scenario for Winslet, but expecting more would be a long shot.
Lee opens in theaters on September 27th.
