I feel like I had vaguely heard of World War II photographer Lee Miller before Lee, but only as hazy background noise. (She was namechecked in Civil War earlier this year.) Why isn’t she better known? She should be so ubiquitous in the legend, nay, what is now the fable of the war that she’d become downright cliché. She was on the ground for the liberation of Paris. She produced some of the very first photographic images of liberated German concentration camps, while emaciated prisoners were still milling around, perhaps in shock of their sudden rescue, and as the dawning of the full Nazi horrors were beginning to hit Allied forces. She was responsible for a series of photographs taken in Hitler’s actual residence, just after his suicide, that… well, not to spoil for anyone not already aware of them (I wasn’t!), but they were a huge fuck-you middle-finger to der Führer, and to notions of Nazi superiority.
Anyway, now we have the tremendous Lee to begin to right this wrong. In no way does this movie do full justice to the enormous audacity of her life, which stretches — as I know now that I’ve done some Googling — from New York (she was American) to Paris to Cairo and beyond, from work in the 1920s as a fashion model and into the early 30s as a fashion photographer and muse to, friend of, and collaborator with artists including Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, and as a surrealistic artistic photographer herself. No, Lee covers mostly just the less-than-a-decade of her WWII war-correspondent work. Miller was so incredible a character that this movie barely scratches the surface of her. And still it is an important film.
Lee unfolds in retrospect, as if to emphasize that with a personality such as hers, as a woman who defied norms and pushed boundaries, it is only when looking back that we can fully understand her, through a more modern lens, from a perspective that has perhaps started to catch up with hers. “I was good at drinking, having sex, and taking pictures,” Lee says as the movie opens, “and I did all three as much as I could.” She is speaking in 1977 to an anonymous interviewer, who asks, “Don’t you want the world to know about you?” (The interviewer is played by the lovely Josh O’Connor [Emma., God’s Own Country], who appears at intervals throughout the film; the subtleties of his performance only become obvious in retrospect, at the brutally incisive ending.) She doesn’t much seem to care one way or the other, which slots right into the no-fucks-given attitude we come to see that she fully embodied with her entire life. She wasn’t trying to break new ground. She was just living as full a life of purpose and passion as possible, in ways that the world wasn’t quite ready to allow women to do… to even acknowledge as a thing women wanted beyond home, husband, and family.
Kate Winslet (Avatar: The Way of Water, Blackbird) as Lee bears a passing physical resemblance to the photog, but much more vitally brings the necessary ballsiness as a woman who faced sexism at every turn but forced it to work for her, because what other choice did she have? Lee was, as we see here, accredited as a war correspondent but was constantly limited in the access she was allowed. When women weren’t allowed into military press briefings, for instance, she detoured herself into investigating the barracks of women nurses. When, after tailing troops from London onto the European continent, she was denied access to battlefields, she documented field hospitals and photographed injured soldiers instead. Would a male journalist ever have conceived of — or had the entrée necessary for — capturing the poignant yet quietly defiant imagery of those nurses drying their freshly laundered unmentionables in the sunny windows of their sparse, harsh accommodation? Of course not. Yet Lee brings us moments like this over and over again. Because Miller was denied the opportunities that men got, she was forced to find untold stories to tell. And she did so with huge impact.
Film is about moving pictures, of course, but Lee deploys still images such as those Miller took — some of the re-creations here are actually ones Winslet took on the set with period cameras — to powerful effect. Director Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer (A Little Chaos, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) making her feature directorial debut, understands the power of a simple image, which feels like a rare thing in our new cinematic era of overly stuffed CGI. The filmmaking here is old-fashioned not only in a good way, but in a way that underscores the story it is telling.
It would be nice to think that the sexism that Miller faced is a thing of the past, but Winslet, who also served as a very hands-on producer of Lee, spoke to Vogue magazine last year about the uphill battle she faced to get this labor-of-love film made, from (male, natch) execs who tried for tit-for-tat bargains to get this “little” movie made to those who wondered why they should care about Lee’s story. Ironically — or, honestly, not really — Lee was a war correspondent for British Vogue, because, yeah, women have always been capable of caring about politics and current events as much as style and fashion. (I am thinking about how Teen Vogue online has become in recent years a prominent voice for rebellion and resistance.) Resonance for our world today abounds here. When Winslet’s Miller opines, aghast, while watching a newsreel popping with positivity about Hitler before war descends, “Not everyone can believe this, surely they can see what he is”… well, insert any given far-right leader on the rise today.
There’s so much good stuff here! (Lee is adapted from a 1985 biography by her son, photographer Antony Penrose; the screenplay is by screenplay by Liz Hannah [The Post], Marion Hume, and John Collee [Walking with Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie, Creation].) In maybe the best way, this is an homage to Lee Miller’s work in that it is solid and workmanlike in its execution while also bringing a fresh perspective. But it’s also joyous filmmaking, with additional terrific performances by Andrea Riseborough (The Death of Stalin, Battle of the Sexes) as Audrey Withers, the then-editor of British Vogue; Marion Cotillard (Allied, Two Days, One Night) as Miller’s friend, French socialite Solange D’Ayen; Alexander Skarsgård (Godzilla vs. Kong, Passing) as Miller’s husband (in this era; she had multiple husbands), the surrealist artist Roland Penrose; and especially by Andy Samberg (Hotel Transylvania 2, Neighbors), truly unrecognizable in his lack of goofiness and genuine sexiness, as Miller’s war-photographer colleague David Scherman. An unexpectedly yet well-deserved dramatic breakthrough by an artist previously underappreciated feels like the perfect little touch for an underdog movie such as Lee to sneak in.
more films like this:
• A Private War [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | BFI Player UK]
• Black Book [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
