Lee: Kate Winslet Shines In A Film About War Seen Through A Woman’s Eyes
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
In the film Lee, Kate Winslet brings a complex combination of devil-may-care bravado and haunted suffering as she embodies the American war photographer Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, whose images caught the surreal horrors of the Second World War, not just as photojournalist, but with a subjective artistry.
Adapted from the 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller, written by her son Anthony Penrose, Lee is a passion project for Winslet, who produced and stars, and for director, Ellen Kuras, who brought it to Winslet’s attention in 2015, partly because of her physical similarity to Miller.
Winslet’s performance — and individual vignettes — have a powerful resonance. But the script by Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume feels unresolved, as if the writers couldn’t agree what was most essential to bring forward about this vibrant, contradictory character.
The film employs a framing device whereby a tweedy young Englishman (Josh O’Connor) interviews a credibly aged Lee in 1977 as she speaks in a raspy American accent. Her begrudging answers, which she offers while chain-smoking and sipping gin, carry us into her story and into the last years of the Second World War.
Kuras, making her debut as a director of a feature drama, is a pioneering woman cinematographer, who has collaborated with such directors as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Michel Gondry, Mary Harron, Rebecca Miller, Jim Jarmusch and Sam Mendes. The international cast includes Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, and French stars, Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant, in mostly secondary and minor roles.
Cinematographer Pawel Edelman (The Pianist) provides the pristine, desaturated cinematography, while setting up the decisive moments that preceded Lee’s most famous photographs: A smoky London street with a warning sign of an unexploded bomb, a frontline nurse’s stockings hanging to dry, women air wardens with faces disguised by fire masks as if they were off to a masquerade ball.
There’s little reference to Miller’s sensational beginnings as a leading New York model in the 1920s before she moved to Paris, where she became a lover and collaborator with the avant-garde photographer Man Ray, a subject of a film by Jean Cocteau and paintings of Picasso, her photo studio in New York or an early, short marriage that took her to Egypt.
“I'd been the model, I'd been the muse, I'd been the ingenue,” says Miller as she tops up her gin once again. “I was done with that.”
The chapter of Lee’s life that concerns the movie begins in 1937, in her early thirties and at loose ends, judging herself only good at “drinking, having sex and taking pictures.” We see her at a picnic with her artist friends in the French countryside, topless, swigging wine and talking about the impending war. A diffident, handsome Englishman arrives, the artist Roland Penrose (Skarsgård). Lee covers her breasts, and they begin interrogating each other, half aggressively.
That night they end up in bed and, when the war breaks out, they move to London. Roland, an aristocrat, Quaker and pacifist, will not go to war but takes a job teaching military camouflage technique, and drops out of the film for extended periods. This is no romance story against the background of war.
After taking photos of the Blitz and the effect of the war on the home front for her Vogue editor, Audrey Withers (Riseborough, busily intriguing as always), Lee is determined to return to France. She lands there in 1943, securing accreditation to travel with U.S. troops, circumventing rules against women war photographers.
She goes under fire at the battle of St. Malo in Brittany, witnesses the liberation of Paris and, later, the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, as she travels across France and Germany as the Germans retreat.
En route, she falls in with Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Samberg, excellent in a rare serious role) who becomes a close friend as well as collaborator in one of Miller’s most famous images, when she and Scherman took turns photographing each other taking baths in Hitler’s abandoned apartment in Munich.
The film’s last act includes a couple of revelations, which feel too weighty to be delivered so late. The first is Lee’s mention to her editor Audrey of a horrible event in her childhood, which suggests she may have been suffering from PTSD years before she ever saw the battlefield.
The second revelation is a twist about the identity of her interviewer. These questionable narrative kinks aside, Lee still features one of the year-to-date’s best performances, honouring a woman who needs to be remembered, along with a sober consideration of the roles of women in wartime.
Lee. Directed by Ellen Kuras. Written by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee. Starring Kate Winslet, Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Josh O’Connor, Andy Samberg, and Noémie Merlant. In theatres September 27.