Lee review
Director: Ellen Kuras
Writers: Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume
Stars: Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, and Noémie Merlant
Running Time: 116 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
It seems particularly unjust that a compelling film about the life of a history making woman has been welcomed with lukewarm critical praise and scant publicity. The story of Lee Miller’s unbridled need to seek authenticity through photography may be conventional in the spectrum of other biographies, but the substantive weight of its truth-seeking convictions provides it an importance we seem to have lost sight of, one that stares toward the specter of death.
Emotional contrast is the key. The experience begins under the beautiful and warm French sun. Lee Miller has left her modelling career behind, but through Kate Winslet she still radiates an energy of ambition and forthrightness that defies the expectations of men in 1939. She drinks, smokes and unleashes her informed opinion upon her friends, who include notable historical figures Solange d'Ayen (Marion Cotillard), editor of French Vogue, and artist Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant). Lee tells us, “I’d been the model, I’d been the muse, I’d been the ingénue...but I was good at drinking, having sex and taking pictures.” Whatever performative innocence she once had, Lee is now a woman fired up with the joy of living in Mougins, France, spending her days picnicking topless in the company of France’s attractive female pioneers and their adjacent men. It’s a delightful way to live. As wine is poured and cigarettes are dragged, Lee’s eye is caught by the dashing Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), himself an artist and art promoter. It’s little surprise to see Lee follow him to his bedroom door.
She pursues her careers too. She wears down British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and works as a photographer during the Blitz. It’s not lost on her that whilst the men are allowed access to the front-line of the war, women are forced to stay home and do whatever bit the patriarchy feels is most appropriate. Persistent and eschewing gender boundaries, by 1944 Lee Miller made it to Normandy, where the sexism continued, until the horror of World War 2 become so consequential, the rules hardly mattered anymore. For Lee, capturing the brutal truth was a matter of moral principle, and she fought for it despite rampant misogyny blocking her path.
It seems cliché to express how extraordinary Kate Winslet is in Lee. Her career performances are forcing us to run out of adjectives. She’s been such a pillar of talent for so long, it’s hard not to take her for granted. As Lee Miller she performs assertiveness without the slightest hint of artifice. She’s as captivating in silence as she is with dialogue, an actor with no weaknesses of any kind. She never makes a bad decision, never crumbles under the weight of heavy exposition, nor misses the profundity of a moment involving complex inflection. As the movie pulls us towards the dreadful, unspoken thing, Lee is slowly hollowed out by the truth, the one the world around her is too scared to hear
In a heartbreaking moment, she once again meets her old friend Solange d'Ayen, who through tears, sweeps up the dust of wartime occupation in her dilapidated home. She is a ghost of her former self, carrying the weight of grief for missing people. “They’re gone, they’re all gone.” It’s a long way from that summer in 1939. Emotional contrast is the key. On the phone, Lee speaks to her delighted London editor, Audrey, who expresses how wonderful it must be in celebratory post-war ‘gay’ Paris. The Nazi’s have surrendered; the war is over. Lee isn’t in the mood for celebration. “Has there been any reports of missing people?” But Audrey has only heard good news. As Lee’s husband asks her to settle down and embrace her role as his wife and live a traditional life, it’s a relief when she refuses all aspects of traditionalism for a more important pursuit. By now, we know her character. She’s too strong, too dedicated to be weighed down by the times she lives in.
It’s a testament to the movie’s strengths that its weaknesses don’t chip the paint. The framing device of the film – an interview between an older Lee Miller and a young man – is underdeveloped and pushes the movie into contrived territory. Fortunately it’s background noise to the period drama. The film is strongest when it allows Lee Miller’s unsentimental personality to drive the narrative; the framing device contradicts this by making her the person that’s being asked the questions rather than the person asking them. Lee (and any biographical figure) is always better as the Subject rather than the Object of her own story.
The film can’t end without a depiction of maybe the most famous bathtub picture in history. You might expect the moment to feel like a shallow stunt, but the context of the picture, of the soldiers celebrating in Hitler’s apartment, of her instinctive need to create an act of playfulness within a landscape of horror, helps contextualize the life of this remarkable woman. The audacity of her to take a bath in the Fuhrer's abandoned apartment, her boots dirtying up his bathroom mat, the statue of a naked woman by her side. The fact this inspiration is impulsive to Lee, that she instinctively sees feminist rebellion in the mundane act of washing, she already knows that even with the war over, there’s much more fighting left to do.
