Film Review - Lee
Acclaimed war photographer Lee Miller is powerfully commemorated via Kate Winslet's outstanding central performance
Kate Winslet is one of my favourite actresses. She has contributed many outstanding performances on both big and small screens. Here, she’s on potentially Oscar-worthy form as Lee Miller, the acclaimed American war photographer who followed the Allied advance post D-Day, chronicling some of the worst horrors of World War II with characteristic tenacity. Her work is powerfully commemorated in director Ellen Kuras’s solid biographical drama.
The screenplay by Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume adapts Antony Penrose’s book The Lives of Lee Miller. It details how Lee was thrown together with Life magazine photojournalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg) during the war. They became close friends as well as colleagues. That aspect of the film proves particularly moving, with Josh O’Connor providing a great mix of banter and understated kindness alongside the excellent Winslet.
Before we get to David Scherman, we see the tail end of Lee’s life as a model, with her photography work for Vogue magazine starting to become her primary focus. A framing device with an older Lee in 1977 occasionally provides commentary on events, beginning with: “I was good at drinking, having sex, and taking pictures. And I did all three as much as I could.” Her free-spirited lifestyle alongside wealthy, influential French friends such as Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cottilard), surrealist poet Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe), and his artist-model wife Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) comes to an abrupt halt when Hitler invades western Europe.
By that point, Lee is romantically involved with artist, historian, and poet Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). A conscientious objector, Roland contributed to the war effort by devising camouflage. Lee is determined to do her part too, frequently challenging her sympathetic editor at Vogue, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), that she needs to be at the front lines of the war. Eventually, she gets her wish, butting heads with the expected sexism of the time but overcoming it with her larger-than-life determination.
Some of her most famous photographs illustrate this aspect of her persona, such as the one of her in Hitler’s bath, with the bathmat stained with ash from her boots that had recently walked through the death camps. This brings me to the most powerful aspect of this film. As the Allied advance liberates Paris and thousands of people are discovered to be missing, we already know the terrible answer to this mystery: the Holocaust. The stomach-churning horrors of what Lee discovers are depicted in suitably sobering fashion, and the film examines the question of how photographing such images changes the photographer. These images can never be unseen.
All things considered, Lee is a well-made piece of work elevated by a first-rate performance from Kate Winslet. In addition, it features fine direction, atmospheric cinematography courtesy of Pawel Edelman, excellent attention to period detail, and a moving score from Alexandre Desplat. A fine tribute to a hugely important documenter of the 20th Century’s most intolerable times.
(Originally published at Medium.)
The Dillon Empire beyond Substack
For a full list of my published novels, click click here.
For more on my novels and other fiction projects, click here.
For my Patreon page, click here.
For my Medium page, click here.