Lee: Kate Winslet captures Lee Miller’s indomitable spirit in this earnest wartime biopic

Lee is a war film. It opens, ear-splittingly loud, with the smoking blasts of gunfire, as American war correspondent Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) darts between sandbags, the camera close to her body. The Lee who collapses in the film’s opening moments has found her purpose exposing the horrors of war through confrontational images and behind-the-scenes reportage, with a style that was very much her own. Some of the images of war and genocide that made it to print appeared in Vogue, of all places, a magazine in which Lee had once modelled as the golden-haired epitome of Jazz Age chic before famously declaring that she would rather take a photograph than be one.

Lee is not the kaleidoscopic portrait of a complicated, fascinating woman that you might expect from its source material, Antony Penrose’s 1985 biography of the artist, his unknowable mother. Penrose’s book, pointedly titled The Lives of Lee Miller, cycles through the various, often contradictory chapters of her life: the successful model turned surrealist artist who worked with Man Ray, her lover and mentor; the libertine turned celebrated war photographer; and the reluctant mother who later embraced the domestic as a talented haute cuisine cook. Lee resolutely concentrates on her life during wartime, implying that she never quite recovered from that gruelling ordeal. Everything else is simply thrown out of focus.

A Vogue interview from last year with Kate Winslet – producer as well as star – observed that she “was intent on focusing the story on Miller’s work rather than her lovers and the sexy artistic celebrity milieu that she moved in”. This is a commendable aim in portraying an artist who art history was at one time stuck on as a muse, model and lover. But to ignore the messiness of her romantic life completely is to offer up a flat and two-dimensional portrait – and anyway, whoever said that lovers aren’t work? In the film, Lee meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), a surrealist artist, in the south of France, where she is holidaying with her circle of famous artistic friends. They strike up a steamy romance, which will wind up with Lee moving to London on the eve of World War II. 

The meet-cute has been conveniently streamlined, their romantic life truncated, when the reality was of course far more complicated. When Lee met Roland, she was already married to a wealthy Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey, and Roland was also married to the French surrealist poet and collagist, Valentine. Lee remained legally married to Aziz for 13 years in a union that Antony Penrose describes as one of the strangest he’d ever seen. Abolishing all potentially salacious detail for the sake of feminist historiography is a bit of an own goal – the film can feel a little lifeless. I spent a lot of it wondering why Lee didn’t just have it off with the attractive David E. Scherman, a renowned combat photographer who worked alongside her during the war – brilliantly performed by the comic Andy Samberg, playing against type in a dramatic role. Some accounts suggest that she did, but perhaps that’s beside the point.

What Lee does do is showcase an impressive cast, not least Winslet herself. Director Ellen Kuras had already worked with Winslet back in 2004 on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where she was the cinematographer, and Lee has clearly been crafted as a ‘woman’s perspective’ on war. Winslet perfectly captures Lee’s indomitable spirit, foolhardy bravery, and sense of righteous indignation, in a performance that appears to be constantly breaking through states of physical exhaustion. Lee struggles up hills, swigs whisky in army tanks and is very much performed like a person in middle age. Andrea Riseborough is also excellent as Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue, playing her with a wickedly funny intensity. Audrey became Lee’s close friend and greatest defender, fighting to get her images of the Holocaust in Vogue’s glossy pages.

Beyond some great performances, Lee does not overstay its welcome and will likely introduce many to an extraordinary body of work. Lee captured important moments in history: from her surrealist photographs of the London Blitz to her searing images of the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, to the liberation of Paris, to the end of the Nazi regime, which she symbolically freeze-framed in an iconic shot of herself naked in Hitler’s bathtub. It’s just a shame that such an unconventional life must be so conventionally told.

► Lee arrives in UK cinemas 13 September.