By Sandra Hall
LEE
★★★★
Rated M, 117 minutes
In cinemas October 24
Lee Miller’s life was so extraordinary that no film could take it all in. Wisely, Kate Winslet’s new film, Lee, doesn’t try.
It focuses on Miller’s most transformative years with a deftness that illuminates a time when the world went mad, while giving a fully realised portrait of a woman whose prickly obstinacy became both her glory and her curse.
Miller was a Vogue model who became part of the set that clustered around the photographer Man Ray and his fellow surrealists in the 1930s. She then decided she preferred a career behind the camera and Ray became her tutor. But at the outbreak of war, she got herself to the European battlefront as a news photographer.
Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller is not easy company, but her integrity is never in doubt.
Winslet, the film’s star and producer, became obsessed with her after reading The Lives of Lee Miller by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, who appears in the film’s introductory scenes, played by Josh O’Connor. He is asking his mother to open up about her war years, of which he knows nothing, and she’s reluctant.
When Miller finally gives in to Antony and the flashbacks begin, we’re transported to 1938 in the south of France, where she is enjoying a life of sunny hedonism with a group of her closest friends. Lunching on the grass with her are the surrealist poet Paul Eluard (Vincent Colombe) and his wife, Nusch (Noemie Merlant), together with Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), the fashion editor of French Vogue, and her husband, Jean (Patrick Mille).
They are all about to be swept up in the war as French Resistance workers, but war is the last thing on their minds for the moment. When Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard), a wealthy artist and collector of surrealist art, arrives from England, he and Miller fall in love.
Later, back in London, now suffering under the Blitz, Miller talks Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), British Vogue’s innovative editor, into assigning her to war stories – a course that will eventually lead her and her friend, Davy Scherman (Andy Samberg), a Life magazine correspondent, to cover the liberation of Paris. And from there, the two produce a revelatory series of photographs recording the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps – hence Miller’s unwillingness to revisit her memories in later life.
The film is directed by Ellen Kuras, a former cinematographer who worked with Winslet on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and she’s come up with a richly detailed evocation of the period. There are a couple of notable omissions. Paris’ Hotel Scribe, which was the wartime home of a host of correspondents, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn among them, seems oddly underpopulated. The script’s concentration on Miller’s achievements means Scherman often comes across as her acolyte, rather than her equally gifted colleague.
But these are minor complaints. The casting is inspired. Cotillard elevates her small role with a scene of devastating poignancy. Samberg, an unlikely choice, given his credentials as a comedian, slips effortlessly into the role of Scherman. And Riseborough’s Withers is an intriguing mixture of old-fashioned politesse and steely resolve in her dogged desire to make her magazine’s war coverage count.
Finally, Winslet’s Miller is a powerhouse – brave, difficult, tough and outraged by injustice. She’s not easy company, but her integrity is never in doubt. She’s a fascinating character in a film that eloquently does her justice.
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