Lee (Preview)
Reviewed by Will DiGravio

Produced by Kate Winslet and Kate Solomon; directed by Ellen Kuras; screenplay by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, and John Collee, based on The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose; cinematography by Paweł Edelman; edited by Mikkel Nielsen; music by Alexandre Desplat; starring Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg, Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor, and Alexander Skars-gård. Color, English dialogue and French dialogue with English subtitles, 116 min., 2023. A Roadside Attractions release.

Lee Miller crossed the English Channel and arrived on the shores of Normandy in July 1944, a month after the Allied forces launched Operation Overlord to liberate France and reclaim Western Europe from the Nazis. At thirty-seven, Miller, the Poughkeepsie-born polymath, had lived the quintessential Jazz Age life. A chance encounter with publisher Condé Nast on the streets of Manhattan. An artistic collaboration and romance with Man Ray in Paris. A role in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930). Exhibitions of her photographic work in the great museums of the world.

But it was in the ruins of the continent, her adoptive home of nearly two decades, where Miller’s artistry came together with, in the words of her biographer, Carolyn Burke, “[a] restless desire for change,” both in her own life and the world she photographed. Restless. Relentless. Resolved. All suitable words to describe the Lee Miller portrayed by Kate Winslet in Lee, a biopic directed by Ellen Kuras that places Miller and her camera squarely within the global antifascist cause that persists today.

Miller arrived in Paris at the age of eighteen, in the period between the wars, able to experience the second half of the Années folles. After a brief return to New York and then time in Cairo with her first husband, she returned to Paris in 1937. Lee begins with an older Miller seated before a young interviewer (Josh O’Connor), who asks her to reflect on the years following this period. The film flashes back to a France unknowingly on the brink of war, to a gorgeous day and evening, when Miller first falls for her second-husband-to-be, the artist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). Miller holds court with her Parisian friends, including Vogue fashion editor Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and surrealists Nusch (Noémie Merlant) and Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe).

At the outset, Kuras establishes the usual milieu that often comes with depictions of early-twentieth-century intellectual life. Wine flows and cheese is plentiful. Sex clings to the air. Cigarettes fuel conversation. On one evening, the group of bohemians sit in their villa’s comfortable home theater, watching newsreels. Soon, the image of an ascendant Hitler appears on screen. Though disgusted, the group seem to hold no fear for its own safety. Solange and her husband, Jean (Patrick Mille), an aristocrat and later member of the French Resistance, begin to dance, the newsreel flickering over their intertwined bodies. Cut back to the older Miller, being interviewed, who is asked, “I still don’t understand how none of you saw it coming.” “It happened so slowly,” she replies. “We woke up one morning and Hitler was the most powerful man in Europe. Even as it was happening, it didn’t feel real.” “So, what did you do?” her interlocutor asks.

What follows is the story of Miller’s determination to never live again in such blindness, to see for herself the wars and genocide rendered by fascism, and to then document them through the immediacy of journalism and the artistry that would assure their place in the historical record. “She believed, as did many of her contemporaries,” Burke writes, “that [photography] was a technique, not an art.” This tension between art and technique, or perhaps what one might call method, is central to Kuras’s depiction of Miller’s life with the camera. Fleeing France, Miller moves to London with Penrose, a conscientious objector then recruited by the government to put his artistic skill in the service of developing better camouflage. Miller soon grows restless. As the Blitz intensifies, she travels to the offices of British Vogue, eager to contribute. Her former status as a model gets her through the door, where the intrigued editor, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), immediately takes the meeting. The magazine’s insufferable fashion photographer Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett) has far less interest. “We don’t hire older models,” he sneers at Miller upon her entrance.

But he soon leaves, and Miller opens a portfolio full of images from her travels. Despite an initial rejection from Withers due to a lack of funds, Miller persists, becoming a war correspondent for the magazine and covering the Blitz with pen and camera. In an early instance, she documents the bombing of the magazine’s own office in London. With the eye of both artist and model, she grabs some protective gear and hands it to the magazine’s stylish assistants, instructing them to pose in the entrance to a bomb shelter. Miller’s innate sense of framing becomes clear, as does her ability to craft images that convey a greater truth through a compelling visual story. “Everyone carried on,” she says, “and I did what I could to capture it.”

Lee marks a distinct contrast with another recent war film, Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), starring Kirsten Dunst as a photojournalist named (wait for it) Lee. The shockingly vapid film, which Michael Sandlin rightly described in Cineaste’s Fall 2024 issue as “a sadly wasted opportunity to advance the aesthetics of the modern war film…[and] to do some hard thinking about America’s highly anticipated dark future,” fails also to do any hard thinking about the nature of photography or the role of the person behind the camera. In fact, the armchair philosopher Garland embraces the myth of photographic objectivity. His reporters are not fallible, empathetic human beings, but barely living extensions of the apparatus, documenting violence with a depraved objectivity—what purports to be a celebration of journalism in his film appears as a complete and indeed dangerous fabrication of what it means to report on the very things Lee Miller herself confronted. Winslet’s Miller never pretends to live above or outside that which she documents. This is true in another early scene, when she photographs enlisted women manning a spotlight. They pose for her, to which Miller, whom Winslet plays with a dry humor, instructs, “Say Blitz!...

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Will DiGravio, a Cineaste assistant editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1