Lee Miller was a pioneer. Initially famous as a muse and fashion model, she transitioned into photography, apprenticing with Man Ray and striking out as a surrealist artist. It was an unlikely training for the second World War, when she became one of the very few female frontline correspondents.
Working for British Vogue, Miller captured the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald. She deserves to be better known – and has found a fierce champion in Kate Winslet, who produces and headlines this much-delayed biopic.
Reuniting with Ellen Kuras, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind cinematographer, who here makes her feature directorial debut, Winslet powers through the war years as Miller is transformed from a louche bohemian hanging out in Paris with like-minded surrealist Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) and the French Vogue editor Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), into a fierce combat reporter.
In 1940, having relocated to London with her English husband (Alexander Skarsgård), Lee pesters the Vogue editor there, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), and her catty colleague Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett) to hire her. She rewards her employers with remarkable images of the Blitz, including the image known as Fire Masks, which features two women fire wardens wearing crude facial apparatus as protection against incendiary devices.
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The best scenes are re-creations of Miller’s best-known shots. Returning to Munich from the horrors of Dachau, Miller and her trusty associate David Scherman (Andy Samberg) hastily close the door on Hitler’s bathroom as Miller jumps in the tub and poses for a now iconic photograph.
Despite the starry cast and Winslet’s dogged commitment, Lee is a very ordinary film about an extraordinary woman. Four credited writers – John Collee, Marion Hume, Lem Dobbs and Liz Hannah – plus years of rewrites, fail to locate the subject. The screenplay is clunky and bookended by an unconvincing interrogation by a journalist (Josh O’Connor). Worse, for a film that depicts the discovery of the Holocaust, Lee is curiously flat and uninvolving. Miller and the images she captured deserve better.
Lee is in cinemas from Friday, August 13th
