Joyce Glasser reviews Lee (September 13, 2024) Cert 15, 116 mins.
In most biographical films, if the teenage protagonist poses nude for her father, an amateur photographer; is rescued from an oncoming car by Condé Nast who puts her on the cover of Vogue; has an affair with Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, and lives with her husband and a Life Magazine war photographer in a ménage à trois it would be a big deal.
In Ellen Kuras’s biopic Lee, these events, if they are even referred to, are not dramatised. Lee Miller’s life is so multi-faceted that the film, though it focuses on just ten years of it, struggles to contain the life or the extraordinary woman who lived it.
If anyone can bring New York glamour model turned French surrealist photographer turned World War II photojournalist Lee Miller to life it would be Kate Winslet. Through her immersive and diverse film roles, Winslet – arguably the greatest actress of her generation – knows something about transformative job hopping.
And Winslet just about nails this spontaneous, decisive, hard drinking, chain smoking, driven American who, years before the women’s liberation movement found a way to do what she wanted and mostly on her own terms.
Just about nails it. Miller, who towered above Picasso in a famous photo, was not only a decade younger than Winslet when the main action takes place, she but still had her Vogue model face and figure. Yes, even in a film that is about the female gaze, and told from the female point of view, physicality matters.
That’s because the script is based on Miller’s son Anthony Penrose’s biography, The Lives of Lee Miller – lives in the plural. Miller’s USP was that she was a desirable Vogue fashion model who flipped – and became the photographer of the most horrifying, unfashionable, undesirable photos ever published in the magazine.
And even Winslet needs a script with teeth and depth: one that involves the audience not just in Miller’s chronological odyssey, but in her psychological journey. If we don’t feel her emotions like we should, it is not Winslet’s fault. Scriptwriters Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, hurry us through historic milestones, significant places and famous people (e.g. Cecil Beaton and Paul and Nusch Eluard) like a package tour guide.
The film is constructed around a particular conceit and framing device which holds a surprise at the end. In the year of her death at 70 (she died of lung cancer), Miller, at the Lewes, Sussex home she shares with her husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), is smoking away while reluctantly pondering questions asked by what must be a journalist (Josh O’Connor). His visible frustration at her parsimonious answers is matched only by his astonishment at the photos spread out before him.
The main action begins in 1937 when 30-year-old Miller is sunbathing topless in Southern France (no doubt at the home of surrealist “it” couple Max Ernst, 46, and Leonora Carrington, 20) with some of her avant-garde creative friends. When Miller is introduced to the British art dealer/artist Roland Penrose, she quickly covers herself and they exchange confrontational banter about class. Neither is as bohemian as they pretend, but it’s love at first sight.
Using lighting, camera lenses and film stocks, American cinematographer (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Summer of Sam) turned-director Ellen Kuras contrasts this sunny, indolent existence with the body of the film which focuses on Miller’s life in London during the Blitz, and her subsequent travels to post-D-Day France on a US visa (the British refused to send women to France).
Within two years of their meeting in France, Miller and Penrose are living together in Hampstead. Penrose, a Quaker, is teaching military camouflage for the Home Guard (and, not mentioned in the film, bringing Picasso’s Guernica to London to raise money for the Republicans in Spain). Miller, in what became a lifelong friendship with British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), is hired to photograph nurses and women at work.
Winslet surmounts the challenges of portraying the first photojournalist of either gender to capture the Battle of St Malo, the evacuation hospitals and nurses’ every day lives, the liberation of Dachau and Hitler’s apartment in Munich. Somehow, though, we don’t feel the exhaustion, the cold, the hunger, the misery and the trauma.
There is a scene in which Miller comes across old friend Solange de Noailles (Marion Cotillard). Now, emaciated and freezing in her derelict apartment, Solange, hysterical, tells Miller that Jean is missing, but it’s not clear who Solange – the editor of French Vogue before the war – or Jean are. Jean Maurice Paul Jules de Noailles, 6th Duke of Ayen, was a resistance hero who was captured, tortured and murdered at Bergen-Belsen and Solange survived the concentration camp. The lack of context means the impact of the scene is more one of frustration than heartbreak.
Miller was a photojournalist but there’s only a brief reference to her writing. This is a shame because Miller wrote articles with such precision and researched knowledge, that her article on battleground medical care could be instructive for the NHS today.
Nor does the film have time to explore the PTSD that drove Miller to alcoholism and then to gourmet cooking for surviving friends in the second half of her life. But it does cover the horrors Miller, and Life Magazine photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg) famously witness in 1945. What the film doesn’t do is connect the two. While we understand the trauma intellectually, we do not feel it emotionally. Nor can a film which must, by necessity, skip over the first, formative, 30 years of her life, explain her obsession with revealing the truth and recording her unique vision.
