It’s surprising that it took this long to give Lee Miller the Hollywood treatment. A former model and eventual frontline World War II photographer, with an eye that rivaled Robert Capa and Tony Vaccaro, she lived a haunted life following the publication of her revelatory Vogue magazine spread depicting the liberation of Dachau. “Lee” arrives in theaters this week as a reminder of both Miller’s work and the need to memorialize the details of genocide. Sadly, the movie does little more than gesture at both.
The narrative feature debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras, “Lee” is a by-the-numbers biopic that manages to flatten Miller’s life and work in equal measure. Part of this is owed to a screenplay by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume that frames Miller’s story as a series of rote recollections in her old age. This narrative device is seldom used to any meaningful effect, eventually building to an ill-conceived twist that robs the real Miller of the twilight despair described in Antony Penrose’s biography, “The Lives of Lee Miller.”
The film begins with a framing device in the 1970s, as an aged Miller (Kate Winslett) sits down for a chat with a novice journalist (Josh O’Connor) and reluctantly begins to narrate her life in the years leading up to World War II. This reporter’s identity does not appear to matter until a late surprise, revealing his connection to Miller’s past, after which on-screen text explains how he actually came upon her story. The details of their relationship, and the reality of how he chanced upon the hidden details of Miller’s life — rather than being told them by Miller herself — hint at a much more emotionally rigorous version of “Lee,” had it stuck closer to reality rather than attempting this sleight of hand. This more intriguing dramatic path would have held a powerful thematic mirror to Miller’s discovery of the extent of the Holocaust, and would have captured her despondency as she slipped down a rabbit hole of drink and depression. Instead, we are presented with a relatively well-adjusted (if slightly grumpy) Miller decades after the war, a woman whose harrowing experiences don’t appear to have left a lasting impression.
Time spent watching “Lee” could just as profitably be spent browsing her Wikipedia page.
The vast majority of the film’s two-hour running time unfolds in extended flashbacks of Miller’s years reporting from European war zones. Although we see the creation of her most famous photos — an abandoned boot merging with a bullet belt, a woman shaved bald on suspicion of collaborating — events crucial to her work and evolution as an artist are given a fleeting, factual presentation. This happened, and then that happened… and then this happened after that. Time spent watching “Lee” could just as profitably be spent browsing her Wikipedia page.
The screenplay’s bullet point unfurling is not helped by a stilted visual approach that glosses over her photos and underplays their stomach-churning power. Images of blood and the battlefield are washed out by the movie’s dim, cold color palette, dominated by flat, dimensionless lighting. Where Miller’s work explored the physical and emotional dimensions of war through the use of harsh contrasts — especially in the gaunt contours of victimized human faces — “Lee” deploys no such flourishes and does not appear to have thought much about how to recreate the sensation of horrifying revelation when Miller and her colleagues first reach Dachau. Instead of gravity, these scenes are imbued with inevitability. Miller’s camera never looked away; Kraus’, sadly, does.
The film does not get much better when it comes to depicting Miller’s wartime romances with English poet Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) and fellow American war reporter David Scherman (Andy Samberg). Skarsgård — a Swede who plays American parts well with a mostly American accent — puts on one of the most distractingly shaky English accents ever committed to film. Samberg, although an American playing an American, similarly struggles with what appears to be an attempt at a midcentury transatlantic accent. Despite a sincere effort, his first foray into serious drama borders on parody, since he can’t quite shake his comedic tics and intonations.
While the ever-reliable Winslet does not make a single misstep as she plunges into Miller’s dueling drive and melancholy, there just isn’t much material for her to work with. In its attempts to valorize her as a paragon of feminine strength in a male-dominated environment, “”Lee”” fails to make her fully human and settles for making her symbolic instead. Winslet may as well have been playing Rosie the Riveter.
Earlier this year, Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” set during a fictitious future conflict, presented war photography as a cognitively dissonant act, requiring one to observe a violent reality with sympathy while also taking advantage of it. That film’s protagonist, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), is named after Miller, whose work is explicitly lauded on screen. Unlike “Lee,” Garland’s film reckons with photojournalism’s spiritually corrosive tug-of-war between preservation and destruction. Ironically, Dunst’’s role is a more fitting and honest monument to Miller’s life and work than her own biopic.
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