Ellen Kuras, “Lee” (2024)
An earnest biopic, “Lee” follows the career of US photographer / photojournalist Lee Miller (played by Kate Winslet) during two periods in her life: the first (and more fleeting) episode sees her living a bohemian life as a fashion model / photographer in Paris and meeting her future husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard); the second (and more significant episode) focuses on her role as a photojournalist for British Vogue during the later years of World War II and immediately after the war. These episodes are set within a broader narrative framework in which Antony Penrose (Josh O’Connor), Lee’s adult son, is interviewing her about her life and the choices and decisions she made which later affected her marriage and her relationships with other people including Antony himself. Lee’s answers are revealed in greater detail through the flashback technique which takes audiences straight to the dramatised actions. We follow Lee as she and fellow journalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg) roam around Paris just before and after its liberation from Nazi German rule and then drive all the way into a ruined Germany to document the crimes committed by the Nazis at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, both liberated by US forces.
“Lee” happens to be the directorial debut of Ellen Kuras, which might explain the approach Kuras uses to direct the film: apart from using the over-used flashback method of telling its story, the film makes very little attempt to flesh out its characters and turn them into real three-dimensional human beings we might empathise with. The film presents Lee as a heroic figure without really detailing what Lee had that makes her so heroic. Not much is made of how Lee originally made the transition from being a photographed model to being a photographer herself, and of the obstacles and prejudices she might have encountered along the way; equally we don’t actually see any British characters forbidding Lee from travelling to the frontlines in France so we have no idea of how much sex-based discrimination Lee had to overcome. What happens instead is that Lee is held up as a role model simply because she happened to be a woman living and working in (what was then, in the 1940s) a man’s world.
About Lee’s later life after the war, we learn absolutely nothing: nothing about the nightmares and other traumas she suffered after seeing and photographing the mounds of dead bodies at both Buchenwald and Dachau (the film actually doesn’t say which camps Lee visited, and I only found out from reading her Wikipedia entry), and which cast a blight over her marriage and her relationship with her son. We don’t see how heavily Lee became addicted to smoking and drinking, and the toll these addictions took on her health. Had the film shown how Lee’s work had caused her so much later suffering and affected her relationships, audiences could have seen a much more nuanced character than the one-dimensional (if still bubbly) cardboard cutout presented by Winslet.
After watching this film – I must admit it is very boring, and the plot and pace don’t really pick up until about halfway through or when Lee arrives at the frontline in St Malo – I did have the impression the film pulled plenty of punches, especially at those points in the plot where Lee had to make an important decision or embarks on a truly perilous journey that will sorely test her ethics and her emotional stamina. The most important message that the film should have made – how does a person continue to live after having witnessed some of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by humans, but ends up being completely ignored by those who most need to see and know what those evils are to avoid repeating such horrors – is missing.