LEE Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Ellen Kuras
Stars: Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgard, Andrea Riseborough, Marion Cotillard, Josh O’Connor, Noemie Merlant.
Lee Miller was former model and glamourous icon who decided to pursue a career behind the camera and became a trailblazing photojournalist. In the 30s she became a photographer for British Vogue magazine. But when the war broke out in Europe she decided to head off to become war correspondent. She persuaded Audrey Withers, the editor of British Vogue magazine, to support her endeavours. Miller even butted heads with military leaders who were reluctant to let a woman go to a combat zone. Undeterred, the maverick WWII war correspondent and photographer captured the horrors of combat as well as documenting the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps.
Ultimately Withers refused to publish Miller’s photographs, but the American magazine Life did publish them in June 1945. Her photographs offered a permanent document of the war and helped subsequent generations understand the true nature of war. Despite being a trailblazer whose work helped shift the focus of Vogue, little was known about her work until after her death in 1977. Her son found thousands of negatives, photographs, journals and artefacts stored away in boxes in the attic of her home.
This biopic of Miller is a passion project for Oscar winning actress Kate Winslet, who became interested in her story after reading the 1985 nonfiction book The Lives Of Lee Miller, which was written by her son Antony Penrose. Winslet has spent the better part of a decade in bringing Miller’s story to the screen and her commitment to the character and the film itself is obvious. She even paid the wages of the crew for two weeks to help out with the financial difficulties she encountered while getting the project financed. The book has been adapted for the screen by Liz Hannah (The Post, etc), Marion Hume (a tv journalist and editor of Vogue Australia), and John Collee (Happy Feet, etc).
The film uses a somewhat clumsy framing device in which Antony (played here by Josh O’Connor, from Challengers, etc) is questioning Miller (played by Winslet, aged through careful makeup effects) about her war experiences, which she seems reluctant to discuss. The film moves between this confrontation and scenes depicting her experiences both in London before the war and during the war itself, but this structure seems to interrupt the narrative flow.
Winslet inhabits the character of Miller and captures her strength, her sense of determination, her prickly personality and drive, her self-destructive tendencies, and her sense of outrage at both the misogyny she encountered and the horrors she witnessed after the liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. She even displays her sense of fear and terror as she dodges bullets and bombs in a war zone. It’s a showy performance in an unglamorous role that will probably see her in contention for recognition come awards season.
Winslet and her team have assembled a strong supporting cast. Andy Samberg, a comic actor better known for his work in the tv sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, essentially plays it straight here as Davey Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine. Andrea Riseborough brings a steely quality to her performance as Withers. Alexander Skarsgard plays her supportive husband Roland Penrose, a British artist and poet and art dealer, but is given little to do. Oscar winner Marion Cottilard (La Vie En Rose, etc) is also given little to do as Solange d’Ayen, a Frenchwoman and friend who joined the French resistance.
The film is directed by Ellen Kuras, a former cinematographer who worked on films including Eternal Sunset Of The Spotless Mind (which starred Winslet), who makes her narrative feature debut here. But her handling of the material is straight forward without many flourishes or personal touches. Strong production values are evocative of the era, as it recreates the freedom and hedonistic attitudes of the early 30s, the destruction of the Blitz in London, and the ruins of European cities in the 40s, to the grim surroundings of the concentration camps themselves. The filmmakers superbly recreate many of her iconic photographs, including her controversial photograph in which she posed in Hitler’s own bathtub in his Munich bunker. The superb cinematography from Polish-born Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, etc) gives the film a gritty surface.
Lee concentrates mainly on her war experiences, which means that we don’t get a lot of insight into her early formative years that shaped her into the formidable character we meet here.
★★★
