Anchored by a powerful performance from Kate Winslet, Lee makes for a war film with a difference
“We have to keep going”
In so many ways, Lee Miller is an archetypal Kate Winslet role – a larger-than-life, take-no-prisoners character who barrels through the patriarchy to get what she wants and is often wounded in doing so, her inner strength pulling her through. That may be an unfairly reductive summary but you know what I mean and I do mean it in a positive way, those are the types of characters I wish we saw more of in major movies.
Very much a passion project for Winslet and by all accounts not at all easy to get made (because of that patriarchy, natch), Lee reframes traditional war film narratives by taking us through Miller’s experiences as a war correspondent, one of the pre-eminent thereof in World War II. Because yes, even now as we drown in TV shows and films about this battle or that battalion, a true-life story about someone whose historical contribution to our understanding of the horrors of that war is incalculable has long been considered secondary.
It’s all the more extraordinary since Miller was already a celebrated figure as a model, artist and aspiring photographer before war broke out. Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume’s screenplay, adapted from the 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose (Miller’s son) acknowledges this early on but sets its focus squarely on her contributions to the war effort, first as a photographer for Vogue recording images of the Blitz, then as a war correspondent venturing into wartorn Europe.
Winslet is superb as Lee, ferocious and forthright, unconcerned about rules that said women couldn’t be near combat and uncompromising in her determination to capture the truth of what she was witnessing. Indeed in the cases of Buchenwald and Dachau, she was among the first civilians to see the concentration camps and along with colleague David E Scherman from Life magazine (an against-type and very effective Andy Samberg), instrumental in ensuring those atrocities could not be forgotten.
Directed by cinematographer Ellen Kuras, Lee is frequently visually stunning and using imagery from Miller’s photo archive, it is able to show the process of the composition of a shot even in the most trying of circumstances. The framing device of a later-in-life Miller being interviewed by Josh O’Connor’s young man allows for flashbacks to drop in moments of breathless tension in its storytelling, as well opportunities for Winslet to wordlessly show her psychological scars, and there’s excellent work from Andrea Risborough as supportive Vogue editor Audrey Withers, Samuel Barnett as a biting Cecil Beaton and Alexander Skarsgård as partner Roland Penrose.
At the same time, there’s a touch of clumsiness in the film’s final moments, a major revelation dropped like an anvil to get us to a deeply fascinating set of postscripts but by that point you’re minded to forgive. There’s a powerful sense here of how different and valuable the female perspective on war can be, as well as a reminder that the way in which we tell and retell historical narratives still has a long way to go before it reaches the balance.
