Before Lee we’d kind of already had a movie about Lee Miller. Kirsten Dunst’s character in Civil War, an old-school photojournalist, had been named Lee in honour of Lee Miller, so she said, and her character was clearly modelled on Miller’s.
Now here’s the real thing, a representation at least, with Kate Winslet applying herself to the task of playing a woman whose life was so interesting that the movie can afford to pretty much toss away her first flush – life as a model and muse palling about with Man Ray, Picasso and the like in the 1920s.
So, flapper not so much, snapper it is, this being Lee Miller the Sequel, the Second World War iteration who fought to get accredited as a war photographer (newspapers not interested so magazines it was) and then fought to get taken seriously as a woman in a man’s field. Later, by grit and luck, she found herself in Paris as the liberation arrived, and then set off for Berlin under her own steam (her picture of herself taking a bath in Hitler’s personal tub is recreated). And then on again to the death camps, where the photographs she took were too much for British Vogue, her sponsor.
The life, it must be said, is more interesting than the movie, which seems to think that simply recreating what Miller saw first hand will be enough. But ersatz is as ersatz does, and this movie has plenty of it, a problem Winslet tries to rectify with one of her intense-therefore-true performances.
It’s a strange movie wasting a lot of good performers. Andy Samberg comes out of it best, as the dignified and loyal right hand man who follows Miller around like a wounded Romeo. Andrea Riseborough is astonishing and just a bit caricatured as Vogue editor Audrey Withers. And Alexander Skarsgård does OK as Roland Penrose, the British surrealist (though you’d never know it from this film), who fathered a child with Miller. It’s son Antony Penrose’s biography, The Lives of Lee Miller, on which the film is perhaps too slavishly based.
But Marion Cotillard in a nothing role? Noémie Merlant (she of Portrait of a Lady on Fire) virtually thrown away? Josh O’Connor in it so he can provide reaction shots as an interviewer in scenes set in Miller’s alcohol-fuelled dotage?
Looking at the cast list it turns out that Picasso does feature, as does Man Ray, but they’re not properly introduced, as if the writing team were fearful that Miller would be eclipsed by their fame. This is to shortchange her – she had an astonishing life no matter who she was standing next to.
“I was good at drinking, having sex and taking pictures,” says Miller early on, explaining her shift from majoring in the first two to the last one, but there’s scant information about what really drove her until far too late.
Is this a terrible movie? No. But it is a boring one – a this-then-this-then-that one – which is a terrible crime against Lee Miller. Watch it for the incredibly well dressed sets, the clothes, and for Winslet’s acting, which here and there is amazingly poignant, like the moment when aged, drunken Miller tilts a glass towards her interviewer and pulls an expression that somehow says “now you know why I drink but it isn’t enough to obliterate what I’ve seen”. Sadly, the movie has all but obliterated what that expression hints at.
Lee – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
