Lee (United Kingdom, 2024)

Despite a terrific performance by Kate Winslet and some powerful moments during the film’s final third, Lee falls into the bio-pic trap of trying to encapsulate too much of a famous person’s life into a two-hour chunk. A chronology of the life of model-turned-photojournalist Lee Miller, Ellen Kuras’ film covers roughly a decade-long period and suffers for trying to cram too much into the story. Based on the authorized biography written by Miller’s son, Antony, Lee gets high marks for authenticity but the production suffers not only from an ungainly structure but a failure to capture the essence of the title character until late in the proceedings.

The movie opens in 1937 with war clouds building on Europe’s eastern horizon. American-born photographer Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) is enjoying a country getaway with her friends – among them Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), Nusch Eluard (Noemie Merlant) and her husband, Paul (Vincent Colombe), and Lee’s soon-to-be-lover, Roland Penrose (Alexandre Skarsgard) – where the talk is about Hitler’s rise to power. Fast-forwarding several years, the film finds Miller living in the U.K. during the blitz and chafing about being unable to contribute to the war efforts. In an attempt to be useful, she goes to Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and offers her services as a war correspondent. Although initially intended to take photographs from behind the lines, Miller, accompanied by Life’s David Scherman (Andy Samberg), finds herself near the front. Her photographs capture not only key moments from the liberation of Paris but also the shocking conditions at the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.

Lee’s first two-thirds takes a scattershot greatest-hits approach, recreating the backgrounds and moments of some of the title character’s best-known photographs. As a photographer, Miller is an observer but the movie stands apart from her, watching her watch the world around her as the war changes it. However, once the movie arrives in Germany during the early months of 1945, the film’s tone and approach change. This is when, in the shadow of sorrow and death, Lee comes to life.

The Holocaust scenes, unsparing in their depictions of what Miller’s camera captured, are tough to watch. And the film recreates not only the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald but the devasting impact those experiences had on Miller’s psyche. During these scenes, often filmed in near-darkness, the movie finds its footing and Winslet’s performance reaches its peak. The shot of Miller sitting in Hitler’s Munich bathtub, which would become arguably the most recognized photograph of her career (it was actually taken by Scherman), is painstakingly reconstructed.

The film is structured using a framing device set in 1977 with the 70-year-old Miller (played by Winslet in passable aging makeup) agreeing to an interview with a young journalist (Josh O’Connor) who believes her photographs deserve wider exposure. She is initially reluctant but eventually agrees to tell her life’s story to him if he reciprocates. The result is a series of extended flashbacks occasionally interrupted by brief interludes set in 1977. Although there is a payoff of sorts to this approach, it doesn’t fully justify the narrative interruptions created by the decision to jump back-and-forth in time.

There’s little doubt that the life of Lee Miller is deserving of some form of dramatization but, considering the time constraints mandated by a conventional movie’s running time, a big-screen motion picture may not have been the best format. Expanding on the pre-war sequences might have provided better insight to the person Miller was before exposure to the battlefield changed her. More importantly, it would have fleshed-out the secondary characters who never become more than vaguely familiar faces with little depth. Ultimately, although some of the third-act scenes stand out, Lee feels like any other competently-made but uninspired bio-pic.

Lee (United Kingdom, 2024)