Emotionally stunning
The greatest artists of our time live on through their work – if their work is displayed, and being a man has always helped that cause. Lee is the story of Lee Miller, one of the greatest war photographers of the century, who broke the rules of gendered expectations while documenting history’s very darkest moment. And then she disappeared.
There’s a renaissance of forgotten female artists at the moment, following the success of Katy Hessel’s @thegreatwomenartists insta page and best-selling book The Story of Art without Men, as well as various schemes like the Countess Count, which works to recognise and rectify the shockingly disproportionate inclusion of male artists versus female artists in our major galleries, so the timing for Lee – a biopic on the photographer Lee Miller – is both timely and welcomed.
The film opens in a bohemian setting, with Lee, played by Kate Winslet, bare-breasted on a sunny afternoon, opulently drinking wine with her friends. It’s here where she meets the love of her life, Roland Penrose, played by the eerily un-ageable actor Alexander Skarsgård. The night and afternoon they spend together is the lumpsum of Miller’s pre-war era, as far as the film is concerned, and this is a shame.
The focus of Lee is Miller’s time spent as a war photographer during the Second World War. Working for British Vogue, she began by shooting locally, raising awareness of women doing their part in the war effort, then boldly relocated to witness combat in what she was told was a pacified location (this was after France had been liberated and many civilians had returned to life-as-usual). When the war was over, she was taken to a concentration camp, where she documented the previously unrealised atrocities of the time. There is little dialogue in these difficult scenes as the audience is given space to absorb what Miller must’ve been feeling, a strange balance of horror and extreme sadness coupled with a heavy responsibility to get the images out to the world. Finally she lands herself in Hitler’s bathtub, staging a photograph with the help of her partner in wartime photography David Scherman (Andy Samberg): she is bathing; her muddied boots sit on the bathmat; Hitler’s photograph is propped up beside her. Miller’s work during this time is profound and her even getting the chance to do the work was indeed gender-defying, but is it enough for the film to fall back on?
What Miller did during this time was game changing, but she also led a remarkable life before 1944, which included working as a model and muse for famous artists, assisting and collaborating with the surrealist photographer Man Ray (it is said that his innovative light techniques may have arisen from a mistake Miller made in the darkroom), and she then became a sought-after photographer in her own right. At the film’s onset, Miller claims she was good at drinking, having sex and taking pictures: ‘Life was fun.’ Perhaps showing us the glitz and glamour of her formative years and contrasting it with what took place at the end of World War II would’ve given us more insight into who Miller was outside of this one significant moment in history.
Having worked with Winslet before as cinematographer on the highly original art-based set of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, first-time director Ellen Kuras could have done much with the extended addition of Miller’s timeline, even if it had only played a small role in the film. Winslet, as usual, is emotionally stunning. Few actors could capture the fearless doggedness of Lee Miller as well as the award-winning actress, who by all means is pure alchemist, mixing a confident, heavyweight portrayal with a melancholy PTSD-in-the-making, a mixture that, in fact, matches the intention of photographer brilliantly: get in there and take the shot but respectfully let the subject’s feeling take precedence.
Lee will appeal to feminists, war buffs and art enthusiasts, but it’ll likely fall short for those who wish to understand more about Lee Miller, a woman who kept secrets so well that her own family knew nothing of her wartime prowess until they found her photographs in an attic thirty years later, once she’d died.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson