Lee
A conventional biography of an unconventional icon, Lee is distinguished by an outstanding turn from Kate Winslet as the legendary American photojournalist Lee Miller.
Picture this: Kate Winslet as Lee Miller
Image courtesy of StudioCanal.
Lee Miller was not only the most celebrated photojournalist of her time, but she was a woman. Repeatedly refused access to areas available to men, she was forced to fall back on her innate ingenuity and imagination to record scenes that would become embedded in the public consciousness. Never one for self-promotion, she summed herself up as a model and ingénue who loved sex, drinking and taking pictures. But all that changed in 1939 with the outbreak of war, when Miller channelled her curiosity and creativity into making images that mattered. An American based in London and working for British Vogue, she was instrumental in turning the magazine’s priority of covering couture to covering combat. In the first half of the twentieth century, photographs carried a different currency as cameras were still relatively rare and a single picture was still worth a thousand words. Her pictures were worth millions.
The Spanish Civil War had Robert Capa, Vietnam boasted Nick Ut and, more recently, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered by the war correspondent Marie Colvin and her photographer Paul Conroy (as depicted by Rosamund Pike and Jamie Dornan in Matthew Heineman’s enormously accomplished A Private War). Kate Winslet has been attached to a biopic of Lee Miller for eight years now, and as a producer she hired the cinematographer Ellen Kuras to make her directorial debut on the project. However, to encapsulate such an unconventional figure as Lee Miller, it seems a shame for the film to take such a conventional approach. And so we meet our subject in old age, interviewed in her living room, casting her mind back over the glory days, her voice carrying us across the unfolding narrative and the salient bullet points. It’s a device that Lee Miller herself is unlikely to have stooped to, but the film is saved by Kate Winslet’s candid and intelligent performance and by a handful of remarkable scenes.
Ellen Kuras has opted for a leisurely pace, a move that drags her biopic to almost a standstill by the end of the first third, before the horrors of the Second World War start to kick in. And then, after a good deal of treading water, Kuras reaches into more turbulent depths to chilling effect. It’s tempting to view the past through the prism of our own times, wondering how an entire nation was seemingly brainwashed by the rhetoric of a megalomaniac spouting falsehoods. Here, Lee Miller is denied the benefit of hindsight and is stunned by the burgeoning truth that so many blameless citizens have disappeared without trace: liberal thinkers, Jews, the black-skinned, homosexuals, gypsies… The number of the missing, in Lee’s mind, could even run into the thousands…
Near the film’s end, a couple of scenes bore their way into the skull, lifting Kuras’s biopic out of the commonplace. Besides the emotional anchor of Winslet’s intelligence, there is excellent support from Josh O’Connor as her interviewer and Marion Cotillard as the noble-born French journalist Solange d'Ayen (making a fleeting but telling impression). Needless to say, the cinematography, courtesy of the Polish DP Paweł Edelman (The Pianist, Ray), is second to none.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Kate Winslet, Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard, Noémie Merlant, Vincent Colombe, Patrick Mille, Camilla Aiko, Samuel Barnett, Harriet Leitch, Toni Gojanovic.
Dir Ellen Kuras, Pro Kate Solomon, Kate Winslet, Troy Lum, Andrew Mason, Marie Savare and Lauren Hantz, Screenplay Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, based on The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose, Ph Paweł Edelman, Pro Des Gemma Jackson, Ed Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, Music Alexandre Desplat, Costumes Michael O’Connor, Sound Jimmy Boyle, Dialect coaches Susan Hegarty and Jessica Hammett.
Sky Original/Brouhaha Entertainment/Juggle Films-StudioCanal.
116 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 13 September 2024. US Rel: 27 September 2024. Cert. 15.
