Film review

  • Lee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Sing Sing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Greg Kwedar (2023)

    Greg Kwedar’s drama is being received with widespread respectful enthusiasm – it’s a prime example of a film whose set-up and subject tend to disarm criticism.  The percentage of Black prisoners in American jails is shockingly disproportionate:  Blacks currently comprise 13% of the total US population and 37% of the country’s prisoners[1].  Most of these prisoners are male; most of the characters in Sing Sing are Black men doing time in the notorious jail for which the movie is named.  These characters are participating in Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), an actual programme that has been running since 1996 at Sing Sing (whose full official name, noted on screen in the opening titles, is Sing Sing Correctional Facility (Maximum Security Prison)).  Several members of Kwedar’s cast are former Sing Sing prisoners and RTA alumni.  Sing Sing is based on a true story in a more meaningful sense than use of that phrase normally implies.  Yet so much of what Kwedar has put on screen rings false.

    The early stages are nothing if not thought-provoking – confused would be another way of describing them.  The protagonist, John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield (Colman Domingo), on stage and in costume, delivers Lysander’s ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and makes an oddly solemn job of it.  I suspect Colman Domingo’s voice cracks with emotion and his eyes fill with tears simply to make clear Divine G’s unhappy plight in Sing Sing – unless they’re also meant to explain why, when the RTA group gets to discussing what their next production will be, someone suggests doing comedy for a change.  Did the group cut the ‘rude mechanicals’ from their version of the Dream (even though the Pyramus and Thisbe debacle might seem just the job for them)?  Or is the idea just that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and like-heavy-bro?  Approached by Divine G about getting involved in RTA, another prisoner, Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), quotes ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’ from King Lear; in the next scene, Divine Eye dismisses RTA as a waste of time; the scene after that, he’s in the group and the one pushing for a comedy.  Most of the other men like that idea; Divine G, supposedly the star performer, is an exception.  So the group’s (white) director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci), devises Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a time-travelling concoction mostly comic but – presumably to accommodate Divine G – including Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.  Despite his wanting to do comedy, Divine Eye chooses to audition for Hamlet, up against Divine G.  It’s not clear if he does this to rile Divine G and, if so, why; or why Brent casts Divine Eye as the Prince of Denmark (we don’t see the audition); or what Divine G feels about that.  By the way, I sat through the whole film unsure if, but guessing that, Brent was a theatre director working in prisons rather than a prisoner himself[2].

    Sing Sing is an original screenplay (credited to Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin and John Whitfield) but you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s adapted from a theatre piece.  There are occasional exterior shots – to indicate that the world beyond the jail is unattainable for those inside it.  There are a few sequences in prison cells and one in a room where Divine G has his latest parole interview.  But the action mostly takes place on, in effect, a single, extended set – the space where the RTA group meets and rehearses, and the hall where their performances are held.  The larger prison context is intentionally negligible.  It comprises a single drugs transaction in the prison yard and a twenty-second scene in the communal TV room – included only to show Divine G unable to join in with the other men’s laughter at the comedy they’re watching:  this is because Mike Mike (Sean San José), a mixed-race fellow-member of RTA, has just committed suicide in the cell next door to Divine G’s.  There’s next to no interaction between the main characters and prisoners not on the RTA programme.  Kwedar is concerned exclusively with the healing, humanising potential of creative endeavour for men in otherwise miserable circumstances.  (The prison’s name obviously also has pun potential, and although the RTA doesn’t seem to extend to musicals, it is meant to give participants something to celebrate.)  Thanks to plenty of gruelling-to-watch prison dramas over the years, I can’t pretend not to be somewhat grateful for Kwedar’s sanitised picture of incarceration.  But ‘real and raw’ – the summary description of Sing Sing from one of the many admiring reviews on Rotten Tomatoes – is just what this film is not.

    Sing Sing, rather, exploits several strands of reality in order to assert authenticity.  The reality of the statistics quoted in the first paragraph of this note.  The fact that the main characters are based on real people or are those people:  while John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield is played by an already high-profile actor, Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin is playing himself – as are Jon-Adrian ‘JJ’ Velazquez, David ‘Dap’ Giraudy, Patrick ‘Preme’ Griffin and Sean ‘Dino’ Johnson.  The film also makes use of a well-founded public perception that numerous Black prisoners in the US are victims of miscarriages of justice.  JJ Velazquez was one:  according to Wikipedia, Velazquez is ‘an American criminal legal reform activist who was wrongfully convicted of a 1998 murder of a retired police officer’ and served more than twenty-three years of his twenty-five-year sentence before being granted clemency.  A Google search on John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield suggests he also was wrongly convicted of murder and Wikipedia’s plot synopsis immediately describes Divine G as ‘incarcerated … for a crime he did not commit’.  The film doesn’t trouble to explain the details of this injustice, though.  During his parole interview, Divine G wells up as he tells the panel chair (Sharon Washington) about his ‘accident’, which preceded the crime that landed him in Sing Sing, but that’s about it.  The lack of information about Velazquez’s case isn’t a big deal – he’s a minor character in the film’s story – but Divine G is a different matter.

    It’s more than a decade now since Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made their fascinating Caesar Must Die (2012), in which actual convicts in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison perform Julius Caesar.   This is docu-drama of an unusual, and unusually authentic, kind but I found even in Caesar Must Die that ‘the longer you watch the men, the more they are performers – and more remarkable when they’re inhabiting characters in Shakespeare than when they’re pretending to be themselves’.  In Sing Sing the cast members who really served time in the prison are pretending to be themselves nearly all the time – and pretending as much as the likes of Colman Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San José are pretending.  The dynamic between the two groups here is very different from, say, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), where Frances McDormand blended seamlessly with the real people on the screen.  Colman Domingo may win an Oscar for his efforts in Sing Sing, as McDormand did for Nomadland, although his performance is nowhere near as skilful.  But it doesn’t need to be, in terms of integrating with the as-themselves contingent in the cast.  To a much greater extent than their counterparts in Nomadland, they’ve been encouraged to act rather than be themselves, as if to show that RTA experience hasn’t been wasted (even though only one of those concerned, according to their IMDb profiles, had done any screen acting before Sing Sing[3]).  This isn’t to say they’re not sometimes compelling:  Clarence Maclin has an especially strong bit when Divine Eye, unexpectedly granted parole, contemplates the prospect with a kind of dazed apprehension.  It does mean, though, that the undoubtedly talented cast seems to be engaged in an acting exercise not only when Brent Buell asks the group to imagine and describe their ideal place, a friend they’ve not seen in ages etc – but throughout.

    Despite its distinctive core theme, Sing Sing often feels formulaic – in, for example, Divine G’s heart-to-heart with Divine Eye that breaks the ice and helps the latter to believe he can act, the suicide, Divine G’s bound-to-fail parole application and meltdown during the dress rehearsal for Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code (which leads to a mirror heart-to-heart:  this time Divine Eye gives Divine G renewed hope).  Bryce Dressner’s music for the film, alternating routinely between tragic strings and hopeful piano tinkles, contributes to the formula, too.  In the finale, once a montage of clips of RTA productions is over, Sing Sing reverts to more generic prison-drama uplift.  Divine G eventually gets parole; when he leaves the prison, Divine Eye is waiting outside to meet him; as they drive away, Divine G feels, through the open car window, the breeze of freedom blowing on his face … I ended up finding the film embarrassing but embarrassment may return as irritation if, as predicted, there are plenty of clips of Sing Sing to watch again during the forthcoming movie awards season.

    12 September 2024

    [1] According to (August 2024) figures on the Prison Policy Initiative website – https://www.prisonpolicy.org/.

    [2] The guess was right.  IMDb describes Brent Buell as ‘a playwright, producer, director and novelist … For ten years, Buell directed theater in New York’s maximum-security prisons …’  He’s also one of Sing Sing’s co-producers.

    [3] Patrick Griffin played ‘Chinook Co-Pilot’ in Lone Survivor (2013).

Posts navigation