Lee Miller lived a truly incredible 20th-century life. This year she has already been name-checked in Alex Garland’s film Civil War, but she has always deserved a dedicated big-screen treatment. Kate Winslet’s new biopic, Lee, directed by American cinematographer Ellen Kuras, does just that.

The opening shot sees Miller loading up her camera, only to be caught in a blast as soon as she presses the shutter. The relationship between photography and brutality is picked up again later, as we watch her become one of the first photographers to dutifully record the atrocities of the Holocaust.

This also reminds us that we continue to rely on the still image as our barometer of truth — as we learn that Miller’s shocking photographs were published under the headline “Believe it.”

The film introduces a framing device of the photographer in her later years being interviewed at home. Casting our eyes over her life’s work, we are sent back to the 1930s to glimpse her time as an artist.

Kate Winslet’s rich biopic of US photographer Lee Miller comes alive in its brutal war scenes

This is where the film recreates one of her most famous photographs, taken at a picnic with the likes of Man Ray and her future husband, Roland Penrose, who is played by Alexander Skarsgård with understated grace and charm.

This particular photograph illustrates how much of a talent Miller was. The still is etched into my brain as it was printed on the wall of a popular café in Glasgow. It evokes a mood and an era, and is enigmatic and shocking in a quiet way. To think that Miller went from taking photographs like these, of friends, freedom and joy, to documenting the Holocaust, in under 10 years is sobering.

The film demands to be seen in the cinema, not least to deny the urge to search for the photographs it recreates (it’s okay, you get to see them in the end credits). But it is almost made for the “second screen experience”, streaming with phone in hand.

By this point, the scale of the wonderful cast is coming into focus. Joining Skarsgård is Josh O’Connor as the interviewer, and Marion Cotillard in a minor-yet-powerful performance as Solange d’Ayen, editor of French Vogue and Holocaust survivor.

Andy Samberg shows promise in his first straight role as Life Magazine photographer David Scherman, who struck a fruitful collaboration with Miller. But despite having his fair share of screen time, he isn’t given much to do.

Andrea Riseborough nearly steals the film as Audrey Withers, the editor of British Vogue with an RP accent and stiff upper lip that is surely now extinct. (Also, watching Riseborough in this role gives you whiplash if the last time you saw her was in Possessor.)

Winslet conveys Miller in every iteration of her life convincingly. A successful model, she learned from the most sought-after photographers at the time. Moving to Paris, she apprenticed herself with Man Ray and made her start as a fine art photographer. Moving to London on the day Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, she volunteered as a photographer at Vogue.

We see the energy of those pre-war days and the fight against male oppression throughout her life. Interspersed is Miller in her older, taciturn years, scarred from the experience of recording horrors dutifully and carefully.

A woman at war

Winslet navigates through all these moments with ease, yet the film feels a little stiff until Miller gets to the frontline. This is when we start to see a more subjective camera from Kuras, and Lee starts to become as nimble and creative as Miller herself.

The handheld camera and use of over-the-shoulder shots finally puts us in her shoes. She’s no longer held at arm’s length; this time we get intense close-ups, missing from the likes of the interview scenes. This is no doubt a deliberate strategy and a sign of a disciplined filmmaker, but I wanted to feel closer to Miller — and Winslet’s performance — in the non-war scenes too.

Adding to this feeling of stiffness is a film noir-style voiceover that feels generic and familiar, rather than a genuine insight into what Miller was thinking at the time.

Kuras and Winslet first worked together on the formally inventive Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I was expecting more stylistic experimentation in their new film, as Miller herself was known for surrealism. But aside from one referenced photograph of a boot and ammunition — and the famous Hitler bathtub image — we don’t explore her craft sensibilities.

As much as this film is a portrait of the artist, Lee also documents how women were treated in the mid-20th century. Whether it’s undermined Vogue editors, female pilots with their wings clipped or young women shamed on the streets of Paris, the film does justice to the plight of women through Miller’s lens.

Sadly, the routine sexism Miller encounters in the film echoes Winslet’s eight-year journey to produce this film. With the cast she assembled, it is baffling how a star of her magnitude can struggle to get a project like this off the ground.

I can’t help but think that a film about an accomplished male war photographer produced by a man of similar Hollywood status to Winslet would be speedily greenlit.

The writer is a Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of the West of Scotland in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 22nd, 2024