Lee

It’s not all that often you get two different feature films valorizing war photographers released in one calendar year. The first, Alex Garland’s itchy and unsentimental Civil War, paid homage to Lee Miller, the subject of the second, by naming Kirsten Dunst’s battle-scarred shutterbug after her. That’s quite a change in fortune for Lee Miller. A model and artist’s muse turned photographer who shot unforgettable images of Europe at war, Miller was then largely forgotten by the establishment, until her son revived her work after her death in 1977. Underappreciated in her time, one wishes better for her than this underwhelming biopic.

The script – credited to Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, and John Collee – is based on the 1985 biography Antony Penrose wrote of his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller. That title is tantalizing, CinemaScope-sized. Lee, alas, is a far more contained and condensed piece of work. (The effect of so much abridgement of such an eye-popping life is sometimes unintentionally chuckling, as when a background character with barely a line of dialogue is revealed in the end credits to have been Pablo Picasso.) The story mostly follows Miller (Winslet) in the years just before, during, and after World War II, when she filed on-the-ground reporting for British Vogue alongside Life magazine’s Davy Scherman (Samberg, understated and touching in a rare dramatic role). Together, they go to some of the most harrowing places you can imagine – including field hospitals, a liberated Paris, concentration camps, and inside Hitler’s private bath – and drink to dull the intense emotional toll of their work. Those scenes regularly break to revert to a two-hander in the 1970s, with a now elderly but still-hard-drinking-and-smoking Miller reflecting on the war years and sparring with an interviewer played by Josh O’Connor.

In her previous life as an award-winning cinematographer, Ellen Kuras captured some truly indelible imagery. (Close your eyes and you can probably conjure a shot, or perhaps the quality of the light, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) But as a first-time narrative feature director, she and her cast seem cowed by the seriousness of the subject matter. The film is oppressively heavy, as if to say a spark of life would somehow be insensitive to the horrors of war. Winslet plays Miller with a permanent frown, even in the film’s beginning idyll in the South of France pre-war, where she meets her eventual husband. (That role falls to Skarsgård, sporting a wobbly British accent and irrefutable proof that he’s only interesting when he’s playing weirdos and psychopaths.) Winslet has been attached to the project since 2015 and by all accounts kept the production in play all these years – the passion is obviously there. But the characterization feels built entirely on negation, of pushing back against every force, even the ones who are on her side. While that may have been true to Miller’s nature, the gritted-teeth one-noteness of it is exhausting.

The third act supplies some answers for why Miller might adopt a me-against-the-world posture, a trauma hinted at but withheld until the final minutes. It, and another mildly “gotcha” development, are not so much revealed as deployed, for what the filmmakers must have strategized would land with maximum emotional impact. For me, the effect was the opposite – merely evidence that they’d rather manipulate the audience in the last 10 minutes than spend the previous two hours trying to better illuminate the inner life of an extraordinary and complex woman.