A review of a new bio-pic on the life of American war photographer Lee Miller
For British actress Kate Winslet, it has been a nine-year passion project to bring to the big screen the story of American war photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977). It was a remarkable life: after working as a fashion model in New York and a fashion photographer in Paris, during World War II she served as war correspondent for the British “Vogue”, covering events such as the blitz of London, the liberation of Paris, and the discovery of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Yet, in the following years, she never talked about her work, even to her son who only discovered her photographs after her death and subsequently wrote the memoir on which the film is based.
“Lee” the film is deliberately the work of women. As well as Winslet in the eponymous role and rarely off the screen, other important positions are filled by actresses including Andrea Riseborough and Marion Cotillard, while both the writer (Marion Hume) and director (cinematographer turned debut director Ellen Kuras) are women. Lee was a brave and resourceful photographer with a back story which included rape as a child and promiscuity as a young woman, so this is a fascinating story. Winslet is simply wonderful as a witness to history who is both driven and tormented and she is presented as a free spirit distaining conventional gender roles.
Yet, the film is not as engaging as it should be, primarily because the bio-pic is framed by Lee, as an elderly woman, narrating her exploits to an unidentified interviewer with frequent and prolonged flashbacks which means that the work lacks the necessary pacing and drive.
Few viewers will see “Lee” on a large screen, as I did, because it has a very limited theatrical release and then goes to the platform of Sky who partially funded it. Between 2 October 2024 – 15 February 2025, Tate Britain will be exhibiting the most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s photography yet staged in the UK.