Lee
Ellen Kuras (2023)
Kate Winslet stars as the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977). Director Ellen Kuras is also best known for camerawork – she was the cinematographer on such pictures as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Away We Go (2009) and A Little Chaos (2014). (Winslet starred in the first and third of that trio, and was married to Sam Mendes at the time he made Away We Go.) More recently, Kuras has directed television drama but this biopic is her first dramatic feature for cinema. Lee ‘took eight years to make and, at one point, due to precarious funding, Kate Winslet (who also produced the movie) paid the entire cast and crew’s salaries for two weeks’ (Wikipedia). The project clearly meant a lot to Winslet: it’s a shame the result isn’t better.
In the 1920s Lee Miller was a sought-after fashion model in New York but her father had already introduced her to photography and she travelled to Paris, just before the turn of the decade, to study with Man Ray, whose lover and muse she also became. During the 1930s she pursued her work in painting and photography, moved in premier-league European cultural circles (her friends numbered Picasso and Cocteau), married briefly and travelled widely – none of which foretold her transformation in the early 1940s into a front-line war photographer. Lee’s narrative focuses on this pivotal time in Miller’s life, moving from shortly before the outbreak of World War II to just after its end. The framing device is an interview, taking place at her Sussex home in the last year of her life, between Lee and a young man (Josh O’Connor) who remains unnamed for most of the film. Kuras and the screenwriters (Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume) don’t have any idea of how to give the core material dramatic shape: the main narrative is one-thing-after-another stuff. The dialogue, adequate at best, turns embarrassingly tin-eared whenever the likes of Lee, Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) and Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe) start deploring what the Nazis are doing.
Kate Winslet nevertheless gives (yet) another good performance – even though (and even allowing for how long Lee was in production) she’s seldom playing a woman of her own actual age, which is nearly forty-nine. We first meet the heroine at a bohemian lunch gathering on the Côte d’Azur in 1938, when Lee Miller was only thirty-one; she’s seventy in the Sussex sequences. Winslet is particularly convincing as the elderly woman. It may have helped that she spends most of these scenes sitting down, minimising the scope for geriatric hobbling that younger actors are often tempted into; but her expression of a wary, weary quality, through her eyes and her facial movements, is impressive. She’s helped, too, by three strong contributions in the supporting cast though none is problem-free. From an early stage, there’s more going on emotionally under the surface of scenes between Winslet and Josh O’Connor than in the supposed meat of the story that Ellen Kuras is telling. For as long as O’Connor’s character seems to be a writer interviewing Lee Miller in a professional capacity, this is tantalising. But his question to her about motherhood prompts a strikingly defensive answer and a hastily suppressed guilty look from Lee. And when she invites him to talk about his mother and he gets flustered, the penny drops: the young man is no outsider but Antony Penrose, Lee’s only child. This exposes the earlier scenes between them, with the son taking notes as if he were a journalist, as a bit of a cheat. In the closing scene, he stands looking out of the window before turning back to discover an empty room. This revelation that his mother is already dead comes with the sound not of a penny dropping but of a leaden cliché clunking into Lee.
The lunch party at the start of the film is the occasion of Lee’s introduction to Roland Penrose, who would become her life partner and, in 1947, her second husband. Their first conversation is a verbal sparring match: Lee, as she gets more irritated, takes aim at Penrose’s privileged place in the English class system. It doesn’t help that the Swedish actor playing him is trying hard to sound upper-crust English but not quite getting there yet there’s a real spark between Kate Winslet and Alexander Skarsgård: that Lee and Roland are hot for each other comes through convincingly. Skarsgård manages to make Roland Penrose interesting despite the script’s reductive portrayal of him. The writers seem to share Lee’s initial prejudice: you wouldn’t guess that Penrose was, as well as a wealthy art collector, an influential public voice on behalf of the Surrealists (and co-founder of London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts). Once Lee is working as a war correspondent and photographer, Roland appears only to mansplain why she should return home, and fails in his mission. After the War, Skarsgård has even less to do: in the couple’s Hampstead home he hands Lee an envelope containing a copy of Vogue then leans on a kitchen chair waiting for her to erupt when she discovers the magazine has omitted her photographs from Buchenwald and Dachau.
Audrey Withers, the Vogue editor of the time, is well played by Andrea Riseborough. She has to share her first scene with Samuel Barnett’s crudely camp cameo of Cecil Beaton; once he’s out of the way, Riseborough conjures up a vivid, emotionally alert character – remarkably so, given how little she’s given to work with. She and Winslet are stranded, though, in the stupidly conceived big scene between Audrey and Lee. We’ve seen that Lee has been able to telephone Audrey from overseas during the War but a phone call is clearly out of the question when both are in post-war London. Lee hasn’t therefore been told that the Vogue powers-that-be deem her concentration camp images too grim for readers. She marches into the Vogue offices, riffles through a filing cabinet, locates her photographs and starts destroying them, while Audrey makes futile attempts to assure Lee that she (Audrey) fought for the images to be published. Lee then switches to quieter recollection of being sexually abused as a girl before complaining bitterly that ‘they keep getting away with it’. She seems to be saying that her own childhood experience and the Nazi genocide are exactly equivalent – a suggestion offensive to abuse survivors, to Holocaust victims and perhaps also to Lee Miller, for being attributed to her.
Lee‘s big moments are repeatedly botched. Walking through Paris in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, Lee finds her old friend Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), aristocrat and journalist, in dire straits, sweeping the floor in her once-lavish home with only a broom for company. Lee hugs Solange and exclaims at her wasted appearance (Cotillard is even more wasted in a feeble role). A couple of scenes later, Lee wanders into a church where the wedding of Paul and Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) is happening: another hug. We don’t know if Lee knew about the wedding in advance or if this is a chance meeting, ie a clumsy way of showing what has happened to two more of the pre-war Côte d’Azur lunch party. Lee’s photojournalist colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg), who works alongside her in Paris then in Germany, is Jewish and understandably overcome by some of what they see and photograph. When he weeps what can Lee do but hug him, too?
I’m sarcastically labouring the point because these embraces are one of several symptoms of Lee’s jarring modernity. Just as it’s doubtful that hugs of compassion were as routine in the 1940s as they are now, so it’s certain that smoking was more popular then. The film reflects that: Lee, in particular, smokes furiously – but that’s the trouble. Kate Winslet, using cigarettes to express her character’s anger or anxiety, proves that even a top-class actor struggles today to make smoking look natural. (Now that researching a role is standard practice you’d think actors would watch old films featuring plenty of real-life smokers for instruction.) I think the egregious reference to the sexual abuse that Lee suffered is another example of the modernising tendency. In a mainstream film biography of the 2020s, if there’s any kind of evidence of such abuse it must be mentioned – never mind how hard it was to mention in the era in which the film is set, never mind how awkwardly it’s forced into the narrative.
The scenes at the recently liberated concentration camps are poorly and evasively staged. Ellen Kuras has her DP, Pawel Edelman, show piles of corpses at Buchenwald and Dachau at some distance from the camera, the images slightly blurred. We’re meant to feel the horror of what Lee and David Scherman are witnessing through their covering of their faces to cope with the death-stench (though we’re more likely to be puzzled as to why they can’t manage to attach the face coverings properly and keep struggling with them). When Lee takes photographs inside a cattle wagon its inhabitants are arranged there just as they need to be to give her a good vantage point for the shot. In one of the camps, Lee comes upon a young girl who recoils in fear as she approaches. The girl is a prettified representation of suffering: she’s pale, slender, melancholy but not skeletal; when she takes the hunk of dry bread proffered by Lee she suggests uncertainty rather than animal hunger. There’s no denying that this aesthetic pussyfooting is something of a relief for the viewer; no denying either that letting us off so lightly is a moral failure on Kuras’s part.
A Google search for Lee Miller quickly brings up the notorious photograph in the bathroom of Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment, taken by David Scherman on the last day of April 1945 (by remarkable coincidence, the date of Hitler’s suicide). Miller, unclothed, sits up in the bath, a photograph of Hitler on a ledge to her left, the shower hose behind her head, the fatigues and army boots she had just worn in Dachau in front of the bath, dirt from the boots blackening the bathmat. The film’s account of Lee and David’s visit to the apartment is even more bizarre than it should be. When they arrive, an Allied drinks party seems to be in full swing. Lee and David make a beeline for the bathroom; it’s hard to tell if this is because they badly need to use the facilities or because the photographs they will take there are pre-planned. Kate Winslet has one of her best bits during this sequence – raucous laughter as Lee smashes the glass of the framed photograph of Hitler, the vindictive way she grinds dirt into the mat. But the ending of the episode is comically bathetic. Lee and David emerge from the bathroom to an empty apartment. They don’t even seem to notice that everyone else has cleared out.
16 September 2024