The first act set-up of a biopic is almost always laborious. Grandiose voiceover and lines of dialogue are laden with the knowing weight of history; various conflicting images of the subject and their ‘truth’ are forced, often boringly, into narrative harmony. Lee, the feature début from respected cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, [2004]) and long-time passion project of its star, Kate Winslet, is quick to fall prey to these generic obligations. Characters portentously refer to one another by their full names (‘What are you going to do now, Lee Miller?’) and historical turning points are neatly condensed into one-liners (‘We’re getting ready, aren’t we, for the invasion of Europe?’). But one also feels that there is a rather perceptive film here, encased within the self-conscious conventions of the biographical drama.

The film’s subject, Lee Miller (1907-77), was a New York-born photojournalist renowned for her documentation of World War II and the horrors of the Nazi regime for British Vogue. In her youth, Miller was also a model and associate of the Surrealists, though Lee is judiciously limited to the period from 1938 to shortly after the war, with Miller already a former-model-turned-restless-photographer. Early scenes in the south of France, warmly and lovingly composed, introduce us to Miller’s circle of bohemians, artists and nobles. This includes Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), a duchess and editor at Paris Vogue, and the model and artist Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant). There she also meets and romances art collector and Surrealist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) with whom she goes to live in London, where she later secures her photography job with British Vogue under editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough).

With full access to the Lee Miller archives, the film has been adapted from a biography of the photographer (The Lives of Lee Miller, 1985) penned by her son, Anthony Penrose, written after he discovered Miller’s extensive collection of photographs after her death in the late 1970s. The script underwent several iterations and is attributed to three screenwriters – Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume – suggestive of a certain anxiety around how to authentically capture Miller’s persona and internal life. Narration from Lee thus acts as something of a binding agent throughout the film, packed with authoritative statements and emotionally frank reflections that often leave little room for subtlety or probing silence.

Josh O'Connor in Lee (courtesy of StudioCanal)

Such narration is contextualised by a framing device, set in 1977 on the Sussex farm where Miller eventually died, in which a young journalist (Josh O’Connor) questions Lee about her life’s work. In these sequences, Winslet is caustic and cosmetically aged. With a stiff drink and cigarette in hand, she is initially resistant to divulging her wartime experiences, a layer of no-nonsense modesty clearly concealing lingering wounds. Here, O’Connor is given the rather thankless role of metatextually emphasising the significance of the film’s own project, insisting to Lee that her story should be told, even as she stresses the transactional nature of their interview. One of the central themes of Miller’s life and work emerges, however obviously, as the value of the document in exposing violent realities, but also the violence of the document itself – the narratives it creates and excludes, and the ever-troubled relationship between journalists and their subjects.

The thick of the story unfolds with the rapidly escalating war. As Adolf Hitler gains power, Miller documents the London Blitz and England’s war effort on the home front for Vogue yet becomes increasingly agitated by her restricted role and applies to document the frontline instead, with much difficulty. Women were not allowed into combat zones nor military press briefings. As the photojournalist is forced to the field’s perimeter (while persistently worming her way into the action), Lee emphasises its protagonist’s sensitivity to the under-acknowledged demands on women during war; this includes female pilots and nurses, but also civilians and victims caught in intersecting structures of violence. Many of Lee’s photographic encounters in the film are with women, rather than military men. In such moments, Winslet softens her character’s resolute exterior into something gentle and sympathetic; we see it in the slow, attentive framing of her shots, the careful lowering of her voice, the conflicted horror of her expression.

The film follows Lee to the brutal settings of many of her most infamous photographs: the Battle of Saint-Malo, during which Miller captured one of the first uses of napalm; the liberation of Paris; the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps; and Hitler’s own Munich apartment, where she staged photographs bathing in his bathtub the same day he died. During this period, Miller often collaborated with LIFE photojournalist David E. Scherman, played by a sensitive and proficient Andy Samberg in his first dramatic role. The character’s personal investment in the war as a Jewish man is given only sparing airtime, yet Miller and Scherman’s onscreen friendship injects some tenderness amid stomach-turning scenes of casualties.

Cinematographer Paweł Edelman lends Lee an excessively austere, desaturated quality. Yet the film is not without its memorable visuals: Solange and her husband ignorantly slow-dancing beneath the projection of a filmed Nazi rally; Roland painting Lee’s bare breasts in blue camouflage paint; a trailer perilously stacked with loaves of bread for starving civilians, overwhelmingly bright against a sparse environment. 

In contrast to the film’s voiceover narration, which speaks frankly but rather generally of emotional wounds and the unreality of war, Winslet’s work is near-perfect in its shifts and gradations. Textually, her character is guided by a need to make the extent of the war’s evils visible to people back home (a famed telegraph from Miller containing photos of the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau included the statement ‘I implore you to believe this’). But in terms of performance, Winslet powerfully evokes a sense of shame. There is of course a shameful regime exposed, but also a kind of shame induced by the limits of what a photojournalist can capture, whom they can help and humanise, and what their images are able to cast into the light. Cotillard’s Solange shows up mid-war in a ravaged French mansion, almost unrecognisable, and tells Lee that everyone they loved is gone, devastatingly adding: ‘You weren’t here, so you don’t know.’ Lee’s guilt and grief are palpable. There are also the limits of photography as an empathetic mode, the physical divide the camera creates. Later, dressed in soldier-like garb, Lee tries to comfort a young girl who views her as a threat. She photographs the child anyway, capturing the terror and suspicion in her eyes, as though ashamed in that moment to be fulfilling her journalistic role. There is a clear moral drive beneath the surface that seemed to be missing in this year’s other film about war photography, Alex Garland’s Civil War, which stressed its characters’ own misguided attempts at journalistic objectivity (while name-dropping Miller).

Winslet has been trying to get Lee made since around 2015, intent on setting the record straight on its heroine, who is usually referred to as a former model in the first instance or else known by her glamorous connection to male artists in the 1930s such as Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. This emphasis on reconstructing Miller’s public image to foreground her photojournalism is an effective one, though it naturally leads some of the larger political context beyond her immediate experience to recede into the background. We know the press and Britain’s Ministry of Information were selling a propagandistic narrative of the war to maintain morale and assuage public anxiety, including censoring Miller’s napalm photographs (among others), but how exactly these structures used or denied Lee’s coverage seems of lesser concern to a plot staunchly focused on its star.

In Lee’s final act, O’Connor’s unrewarding role as a journalist takes on renewed purpose, though a sentimental change in direction is unable to match the same depth of feeling evoked by something as simple as Winslet’s furrowed brow in the grim face of death. Kuras’s feature is, on at least two levels, a film about attempting to understand a woman through the things she photographed, piecing together arrested moments from the continuum of her life. Lee suggests that the intricacy of this project – with its fragments and flights of imagination – cannot be adequately captured by the traditional biopic form, which endeavours to make its subject as available as possible to the viewer. As a result, there is a profound disconnect between Winslet’s searing performance and its staging in relation to the horrors Lee documents – the inarticulable cruelty of war atomised and reconstituted by the image – and the film’s hand-holding narrativising. Still, the film stirringly insists on the power of Lee Miller’s photographs and the complexity of the woman behind them, even when limited by a familiar form.

Lee (StudioCanal) is released nationally 24 October 2024.