LEE
THREE STARS Former model Lee Miller picks up a camera and becomes a celebrated war correspondent.
DRAMA UK/US English #LEE
Starring Kate Winslet, Josh O'Connor
Elizabeth LEE Miller (Kate Winslet) was something of a polymath; a successful model, photographer and celebrated war correspondent. She also suffered from depression and had questionable relationships with most significant figures in her life, notably her son. Some of this makes its way into Ellen Kuras’ robust drama, much of it doesn’t, a problem that creates too many moments to ask too many questions about her film.
Winslet commands in the lead role (one that has earned a Golden Globe nod), capturing much of the resilience and vulnerability of this incredibly complex woman. Yet there’s only so much she’s able to do with an unevenly paced narrative that glosses over Lee’s early life and lingers too long on other passages before landing a one-two ending that is, at best, unsatisfactory.
Before then, we start at the end where Lee is the in the middle of a prickly interview with a young man (Josh O’Connor). The story quickly jumps back to her unguarded life in the 1930’s. Here she meets her future husband (Alexander Skarsgård) among a well-healed set of Bohemian artists (including, among others, the woefully under-utilised Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant). When the war arrives, Lee and Roland retreat from France to England. Determined to ‘do her bit’, she convinces the editor of LIFE magazine (a wonderfully spirited Andrea Riseborough) to let her take a camera into the battlefield. She does and the rest is some of the best journalism of World War II.
There is a lot to like about LEE - notably how Kuras captures Winslet's fierce and nuanced portrayal of Miller as she navigates the male-dominated realms of art and war journalism. The film’s vivid cinematography is bold and brings some rare freshness to the familiar starkness of wartime Europe and the atrocities inflicted. LEE does not shy away from depicting the horrors Miller documented, including the liberation of concentration camps, providing a sobering reminder of the war's atrocities. It’s important that it does, given the subject matter.
Yet despite the star-studded cast and compelling production values, there’s a misalignment in the narrative, a tendency toward biopic tropes and a contentment to gloss over scenes without context for the unfamiliar (what was the half-naked picnic about and really, what was Lee thinking when she sat in Hitler’s bath?). Coupled to a shockingly unexplored ending that undermines both the film and Lee’s own legacy we’re left feeling we’ve only seen half the story. When that story is Lee Miller, we deserve more.
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