Kate Winslet’s newest film, Lee, is a long-simmering passion project for the actress. Produced by Winslet and directed by Ellen Kuras, it’s a fictionalized account of real-life war photographer, Lee Miller. A sought-after model and member of France’s surrealist art movement in her early years, she became a war photographer for British Vogue during World War II. The film, with a screenplay by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee, follows her from the beginning of Hitler’s rise through the end of World War II.
However, we start with Lee in 1977, as she talks about that period of her life during an interview. The film then flashes to Lee in France in 1936, after her romantic and professional dalliance with Man Ray has ended and just as Hitler is rising to power. We understand just what kind of woman she is when she sits down to an outdoor summer vacation dinner with her artist friends and immediately removes her top, her breasts on full display. She covers them, though, when Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) appears. A surrealist gallery owner who’s sold many nude photographs of Lee and is also a painter himself, he doesn’t hesitate to start flirting with Lee. She, though, is defensive, asking him probing questions and almost cruelly surmising his background and even his insecurities in moments. Roland, however, is just as perceptive and before long, the pair are shacked up in London together when The Blitz begins.
Though the courtship is rapid, Skarsgård and Winslet are two of our sexiest actors and we easily understand Lee and Roland’s physical and intellectual connection through their banter and physicality. Likewise, when Roland lends his art skills in the war effort, developing new methods of camouflage, we understand why Lee, whose friends are trapped in occupied Paris, is desperate to make a difference too. Winslet plays Miller with an almost chaotic fierceness. Lee may walk into British Vogue‘s offices docilely, but she’s furious when its editor, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), initially declines to hire her. Blunt and quick to anger, Winslet’s performance is brassy — almost to the point of camp —but Winslet keeps it just under control. When Lee is finally sent to Europe, she’s undeterred when she’s initially turned away from the press tent, disguising herself as a man to sneak in. Likewise, a few minutes later, when she’s shown into the medical tent where the doctors perform “hundreds” of procedures every day, she doesn’t shy way from the gore, but uses her flashlight to illuminate an amputation when the electricity goes out and then solemnly photographing the aftermath.
However, while Winslet’s performance paints Miller as a charismatic ballbuster motivated to record the war’s grizzly realities, the film isn’t quite so direct with Miller herself. While Lee is seemingly unattached if, as she readily admits, sexually voracious when Roland saunters into her life, Miller was in fact married at the time, not divorcing her first husband until after the war and well into her relationship with Penrose. Likewise, though she and friend/collaborator/Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg) were allegedly lovers when he took the infamous photo of her bathing in Hitler’s tub, the film makes sure the audience sees them as strictly platonic. The only time Winslet and Samberg share a bed is when Lee wakes David in the middle of the night to complain that the British military won’t send her to Europe because of her gender.
Still, while Lee can sometimes verge on hero worship (perhaps in part because it’s based on her son’s biography of her), it does treat both what Miller photographed and her own traumas with intelligence and empathy. Throughout the film, Lee’s behavior suggests some past personal horror. During her first time in an active war zone, she discovers that a young French girl was tricked by a duplicitous German soldier into sharing information about the French resistance. When an American soldier tries to blame the girl, Lee flies off the handle. Later, when the girl is publicly humiliated by her fellow townspeople, Lee says something about shame that feels loaded with meaning. In the film’s last act, when she and Scherman are among the first people to enter Dachau after its liberation, it’s not the train full of bodies that upsets her most, but a young girl who recoils in fear when she enters the room.
With each similar experience, it seems clear that what’s driving Lee isn’t just her integrity as a journalist, but an almost self-destructive and maybe even self-healing quest for justice. While the film could easily rely on Winslet’s performance and those subtle suggestions to let the audience work out exactly what happened to Lee, it does, eventually make her sit down and confess. However, while that scene could become a cliche that feels built to become a future Oscar clip, the dialogue is spare in that moment, relying on Winslet to convey everything with facial expressions instead of going into the awful details. It’s a bold and even satisfying twist on that kind of scene and it’s the first striking choice in a series of bold storytelling choices during the film’s final minutes that leave Lee feeling more structurally daring than it might initially feel.
Though Lee may not revolutionize either the biopic or the or the war picture genres, it does at least paint an emotionally compelling picture of a real-life figure. Winslet is one of our great actors and watching her showcase her talents in a film that lets her wield her star power in the service of memorializing one of the great forgotten women of history is a treat if nothing else. Certainly, Lee tends more toward hagiography than candid portrayal, but it rings historically and emotionally true and that’s perhaps more vital.
