Lee (2024)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Cinematographer and television director Ellen Kuras debuts as a feature film director with Lee, a wartime biopic that was released piecemeal in the US as awards season heated up. Kuras, whose work includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, Blow, and A Little Chaos, reunites here with Kate Winslet for a project more grounded in reality than what she usually captures on camera. Perhaps that's because she's using a different cinematographer, but I think it's also due to her surprising subject matter. Kuras understands what being a photographer is all about, how it involves a curious blending of intrusive and unobtrusive observation and a fierce determination to be present in moments when and where things happen. Coming out the same year as Civil War, which covers similar ground in fictional/speculative terms, Lee never manages to be as interesting or urgent as it wants, though it is a diverting and satisfying two hours.

The story concerns Lee Miller, a former NYC fashion model and urban bohemian who lived in France before marrying an artist and academic and moving to London. Working for Vogue by the time WWII erupts, she becomes a special war correspondent starting with the Blitz, navigating (and flouting) laws and restrictions designed to keep women away from potentially dangerous stories. Embedded with American forces, she photographs the Allied invasion of France and liberation of Paris, reconnecting with her French contacts and learning about the thousands of people who "went missing" during Nazi occupation. She and her journalist partner, David Scherman (Andy Samberg, in an uncharacteristic but welcome performance), scour the frontlines before finally getting footage in Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after those camps were liberated. A small climax of the film occurs when, just prior to Germany's surrender, they get to Munich and take pictures in Hitler's apartment, including the famous image of a naked Miller in his tub.

That's really the story, a simplistic and streamlined chronology of Miller's career. Kuras adds very little art to the proceedings, though she's bound by a screenplay attempting to recreate an entire life in a short amount of time. Written apparently by committee, it's disappointing that the film provides almost no insight into either Miller's own identity or the women carving out their own place in an industry unwilling to let them. Kate Winslet performs with her typical excellence, but even her likability -- here stilted to a fault, intentionally, to better depict the somewhat curmudgeonly, disillusioned nature of a career on frontlines -- can't effectively round out her flat, opaque character as it is written. If anything, Winslet and Kuras seem determined to showcase not the woman behind the camera but rather the phenomenon of any photographer who seeks to reveal truth in others while actively concealing herself. The former model and abstract bohemian becomes hard-boiled by the atrocities of war and the infringements of a male-dominated job market, and while that could offer interesting insight, Lee stops short of such epiphany. 

If anything, perhaps the centerpiece of Miller in Hitler's tub could have been a short film, and the whole thing summed up thus. After all, for a world-weary and likely traumatized war correspondent to whip off her clothes and pose like an art student in the tub of a fascist dictator, there seems to be a curious surrealism in her art, a performativity rooted in her carefree pre-war life that even the constraints of her chosen career cannot contain, staging a shoot to make a provocative artistic point beyond any photojournalistic impetus or mandate.

But the film is framed in a curious way that requires some commentary. Spoiler alert forthcoming, in case you are desperate for a plot twist in this otherwise straightforward character drama. The film presents itself as Miller's story as told by Miller herself. Winslet plays an aged Miller at her home in 1977, telling her life story to a meek interviewer, played by Josh O'Connor. By film's end, his hesitant questions and awkward demeanor is revealed to be due to his being her adult son, Antony Penrose, who knew nothing of her life's work. She never discussed her time in the war, no doubt due to the trauma and her subsequent alcoholism. And her pictures were apparently not published during her life, as the British censors decided that photos of the war and concentration camps would only further upset the already traumatized British public. While discussing her experiences and their effect on Miller, they also discuss Antony's difficult and distanced relationship with her. The already thick melodrama reaches its boiling point when, finally, it is revealed that Miller recently passed away, and that Antony is learning all of this from her hidden photographs in the attic as he's cleaning out her house. His interview is only in his head. She's inscrutable as ever -- indeed, we only see her true colors in the film in brief moments when she sympathizes with or protects women, such as fending off a rapist in Paris and comforting his would-be victim -- and her gruff, stoic presence does little to help the film feel like anything more than a History Channel dramatized retelling of someone's life.