We have so many World War II-era films and biographical films of varying quality that for a new one to feel properly worthwhile it must possess a strong raison d’être. For Kate Winslet, a producer and the star of Ellen Kuras’ Lee, this film’s ultimate purpose is not to recount the life of a remarkable figure, but to reveal her interiority. Winslet and her producing team weren’t seeking to tell a “cradle-to-grave story,” settling for the standard biopic treatment. They had a richer, more slippery objective: dramatizing Lee Miller’s core drives, portraying “a human being with a heart and a soul, and how the horrors of war affected her.” It’s a noble goal that isn’t entirely achieved, lost in the film’s paint-by-numbers execution.
At the film’s start, an older Lee Miller (Winslet) invites a reporter (Josh O’Connor) into her home. With him, she looks back on her earlier life, remembering the idyllic days in late-’30s Paris spent drinking, debating, and creating with her artsy friends, a career as a successful model already behind her. She meets and quickly falls for Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), a British painter and curator who astutely reads her, recognizing her strong passion for photography along with an aimlessness that’s made her a purpose-seeking drifter. It’s not long before the London Blitz brings World War II to her doorstep and with it her call-to-action. She’s accredited with the U.S. Army as a war correspondent and sets out to photograph the war effort for British Vogue, befriending fellow American photojournalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg) along the way.
While the narrative is primarily focused on this crucial decade-long stretch of Miller’s life, Lee doesn’t fully avoid the pitfalls of the “cradle-to-grave” approach. The film’s plotting is sweeping, gliding across the breadth of Miller’s experience without convincingly touching down into its depths. The moments when the characters engage each other often fall into a perfunctory lull, the dialogue communicating a scene’s most obvious ideas with more interesting terrain left untapped. The frame story setup provides the justification, or excuse, for the older Miller’s recurring voiceover to layer in character information the audience ought to be more compellingly shown rather than patly told. Too often the film omits Miller’s moments of challenge to keep the plot moving. We see her in action without much external conflict to produce the urgency driving said action. We see her stand up to those who underestimate her, empathize with others who are vulnerable or victimized, witness and endure evil once her journey takes her to the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. From the cinematography and strong set design to Winslet’s committed performance, there are successful elements here that suffer from an overall lack of incisiveness in approach.
More frustrating is the film’s inability to draw upon the more trenchant dimensions of its ideas. What does Lee have to say about photography and the power of the image? Clearly there’s something on the movie’s mind there, especially in the scenes where Miller photographs female subjects in the aftermath of trauma, her face pained, inquisitive, and stony all at once. Does she detect a voyeuristic, exploitative aspect in her work? Does she detest this or is it an example of her indomitable spirit that she overcomes it? Any lasting effects aren’t immediately clear from scene to scene, save for when her drinking as a coping mechanism is referenced. What power does the human body have to move us? There’s a sense of juxtaposition between the sunlit scenes of Miller and her scantily clad friends at the film’s beginning versus the ravaged states of the bodies she stumbles across with the more war photos she takes. Does her past as a fashion model affect her, or the film’s, views on this question? Early on, Miller states she’s after knowledge, wanting to venture forth and see the world in order to “know all there is to know.” What does the film have to say about the quest for truth? Toward its conclusion, the idea that certain things ought to be reckoned with, even and especially if they are uncomfortable, is raised without greater payoff, as if merely nodding to the idea is enough. The film is littered with these breadcrumbs that don’t add up to anything satisfying or revelatory. Despite its clear desire to be penetrative, Lee instead more frequently manages a breezy superficiality.
DIRECTOR: Ellen Kuras; CAST: Kate Winslet, Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions/Vertical; IN THEATERS: September 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 57 min.
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