Lee (2023)

As trailblazing WWII photojournalist Lee Miller, Kate Winslet goes for the jugular

Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) aimed her photographic skills at life-changing scenes of war

Lee (2023)

In theaters

Kate Winslet is a poised, meticulous actress, yet she rarely leaves an entirely refined, “finished” impression on screen.  No matter how complex or sophisticated her role, a demand for plain talk soon hardens in her eyes.

As Lee Miller (1907-1977), the 1930s fashion model turned hardheaded WWII photojournalist, Winslet jumped on my nerves and stayed there.  It’s a deliberately “irritating”, kick down the doors performance, and Winslet never lets up.

In her early scenes on the sun-soaked French Riviera at the start of 1939, Winslet swings her hips suggestively and smartly tosses her head back to swallow shots of whisky as if Miller were declaring, Don’t try to stop me; I’m making my own good time here.  Even if it’s not so good as all that.

She’s discontent and can’t express it directly.  Merrily lunching al fresco with friends, she nonchalantly goes topless at the table and no one in the jaded company bats an eye.  That’s Lee, their non-reaction seems to say.

A restless American, she left a stellar New York modeling career in the late 1930s for Paris to build on her love of photography, studying under Man Ray.  But by the end of 1939 her restiveness had outgrown the chic bohemianism of her friends in the radical French surrealist art scene.

What could serve in its place?  Hard stuff, as she puts it to her British artist-designer husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), who’s not sure what she means, but lets her follow her raw instincts.

Suddenly her big break arrives.  Europe is under siege by the Nazis.  Hitler begins bombing Britain.  Fortunately, under Man Ray’s guidance, Miller has become a coolly adept photographer.

After moving to London and doing fashion shoots for British Vogue she’s jolted by the Blitz, compelled to go into bombed-out buildings and the Underground to photograph Londoners deeply shaken but carrying on.

This bedeviled, gutsy Miller is the pioneer who screenwriters Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee bring to life.  During WWII, Lee fights to become that all but unheard of professional, a female war correspondent.

More than that, a photojournalist, when only a handful of women were able to cut through red tape and take up that vital role on the front lines.  To pull it off, Miller has to be not just a quick-off-the-mark photographer but also a ball buster.

She bluntly, profanely defies male officers trying to deny her entry into tactical military press briefings, where only men are allowed.

Women were forbidden to go to the front by the British, but fortunately, America allowed female photojournalists into combat zones. 

Still, to get close to the action, Lee has to tuck her hair under a cap and don military trousers to disguise herself as a male.  This ploy is quickly exposed, but by then she’s so deeply embedded the brass let her keep working.

We see her in France narrowly ducking gunfire, dodging explosions, and – between terrifying blasts – photographing and comforting badly wounded soldiers.  Her mastering in London of the way to properly hold and shoot with a Rolleiflex camera becomes crucial.

It’s a deftly marshaled skill.  Placing the Rolleiflex not in front of her eyes but at stomach level, looking down to focus then up to talk directly to her subjects, she captures people in unguarded conversation, gets them to open up without “posing”.

She sends these guileless, sometimes shattering candid images back to British Vogue, where they deeply impress the magazine’s readers.

One scene of destruction is so wrenching she can barely bring herself to shoot it.  It’s in the Paris home of a friend from the Riviera, Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cotillard).  Lee finds the once beautiful model now rail-thin, numbed and desolate, her elegant apartment nearly totally destroyed by German gunfire.

But ravages of battle aren’t the only subject that compels Lee.  She needs the inside scoop on Allied advances into western France and Germany, where she believes she can take pictures of calamity that will stir the world’s conscience.

To do it, perhaps inevitably, she needs the help of a male photojournalist for entree into crucial war sites to capture the conflict’s full, horrific scope.

David Scherman (Andy Samberg) and Miller headed for the belly of the beast in Dachau

She befriends Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg), and they become inseparable helpmeets who travel by jeep for months through a still vulnerable France and on into hellish Germany.

There the most hideous nightmares are exposed by the camera’s unwavering gaze.  The pair take harrowing pictures of the death camps at Ohrdruf, Penig and Buchenwald. 

The movie’s most horrific moments come when they arrive on the day of liberation at Dachau.  Both climb into open railroad cars reeking of the stench of death to photograph the corpses of murdered Jews.

For the first time we see Scherman, who was Jewish, weep uncontrollably.  Comic actor Samberg, stalwart of both SNL and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, gives a sober, finely judged performance.

In a final coup of ballsiness, we arrive at the most talked about feat in Miller’s career.  She and Scherman make their way to Munich and gain entry to Hitler’s abandoned apartment.  The Allied officers who now occupy the place don’t catch them sneaking into the bathroom.

There, in her most “celebrated” act of bravado, Miller stamps the dirt of Dachau from her boots onto Hitler’s yellow bathroom carpet, then strips and climbs into the tub to be photographed by Scherman as she takes a bath.   She props up a photo of the Fuhrer beside her.

It’s an inimitable blend of rage and showing off that underscores Miller’s self-confidence and moral outrage in one outrageous flipping of the bird to the Nazis.  (Bizarrely, on the same day Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.)

Miller was no goodie two-shoes, no lofty moralizer about war’s injustices.  She took shocking photos hoping to rattle the Western world, yet her pictures of German atrocities never appeared in British Vogue.

The government deemed the images too disturbing for a war-weary populace that, after the defeat of the Nazis, needed to move on.

Some of them were published in American Vogue, but the most searing ones never came to light until after Miller’s death in 1977.

Which presented the filmmakers, including first-time director Ellen Kuras, with a unique problem.  How to tell a story whose deepest personal dimensions only Lee, Scherman and British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) fully understood.

They choose a disarming framing device that I think works sublimely.  The movie opens with an older Miller, seated in her British country home in 1977, still avidly smoking, drinking (though she reined in her alcoholism in her final years) and hurling abuse at an uncaring world.  And wondering what her life added up to.

Opposite her is a man in his late 20s (Josh O’Connor), an interviewer who, with a studied distance, poses subtly crafted journalistic questions to Miller about her life. Scattered before them around the room are hundreds of Lee’s WWII photographs, searing, heart-stopping prods to the conversation.

At well placed intervals in the WWII drama, we cut back to this interrogation during Miller’s final days to learn how much perspective – and honesty – she can bring to bear on her life’s journey.

O’Connor acts these interludes with a spare, measured grace.  It’s a tastefully understated supporting performance.  Winslet in this tete-a-tete is more gravelly-voiced, and even more cantankerous, than in the WWII scenes. O’Connor’s becalmed acting nicely complements Miller’s bitter-to-the-end iconoclasm.

This intimate exchange elegiacally rounds out the portrayal of a woman who blazed trails in photojournalism but never quelled her inner demons.  We’re left respecting Miller’s search for a moral accountability that the postwar world simply couldn’t provide.

This is the main reason I find Winslet’s work here enthralling.   It’s a full-throated cry for justice, both for women and the war dead, whose sorrow Miller furiously pleads still hasn’t been measured or atoned for.  Winslet and the creative team here refuse to soften either warfare or Lee’s outrage that its full cost hasn’t been counted.

Lee was initiated by Winslet in part after her enraptured reading of The Lives of Lee Miller, a 1985 biography by Miller’s son Antony Penrose (who’s a producer here).  It’s from that book the story we see here was drawn, pivoting on Miller’s scarring, disillusioning war experiences.

Including multiple script rewrites, the project took Winslet and her collaborators nine years to bring to the screen.

It’s bravura mainstream moviemaking that’s determined to stir the conscience.  Put another way, it’s the kind of picture Stanley Kramer might have made, and could serve as a companion piece to Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).

But it’s glaringly apparent that Kramer’s brand of change-the-world earnestness, mocked as self-righteous even in his heyday, has vanished from today’s moviemaking culture, at least in Hollywood.

Which, paradoxically, now puts us in an even better position to profit from movies as civil, clear-headed and bracing as Lee.  Winslet’s cold calm stare into the camera is a flinty reminder of what “commitment to the truth” can actually mean.