After watching Lee last night, I can at least say that I’m much more familiar with the life and times of Lee Miller, and for that I’m grateful. I apologize for my previous ignorance.
For Lee — shot in late ’22, premiered in Toronto 12 months ago, opening on 9.13.24 — is a reasonably sturdy, realistic and believable portrait of a gutsy feminist firebrand who went for the gusto, and under fire at that.
Born in ’07, Miller died 37 years at age 70.
The Lee screenplay was written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, and is adapted from Antony Penrose‘s “The Lives of Lee Miller” (’85).
Winslet produced and even personally coughed up for two weeks of expenses during filming.
A 1920s fashion model turned Parisian expat, Man Ray-influenced photographer and renowned WWII Vogue photojournalist (London Blitz, 1944 Paris liberation, horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau), Miller was in her late 30s when her war experiences began. Winslet was in her late 40s when filming started, but she and the 1940s-era Miller clearly resemble each other. Past their foxy prime (weathered, not slender) but with good bones and take-no-shit demeanors.
The film tells us that in real life Miller never rolled over for anyone — bristling with moxie, defiance, bravery. Sipped from a metal flask, smoked like a chimney.
Winslet and Alexander Sjarsgard, who plays her lover Roland Penrose, are only a year apart in age, although he’s in better shape.
Winslet has told journalists that she’s accepting of the fact that she’s become something of a big girl (not fat but fleshy, ample), but she’s also made sure that Lee viewers will understand that her bodacious ta-tas are just as big and bountiful as ever. Lee features three boob-flashing scenes, and one in particular definitely struck me as erotic — a moment when Penrose smears green body paint all over her upper torso.
Lee Miller was tough and gutsy and liked to fuck and smoke and hang out with the swells, and she took no shit or derision from sexist males. She was tough, scrappy, blunt.
Her experiences in war-torn France are tonally grim and draining but enveloping all the same. Kuras makes certain that we understand that war is hell, horror, slaughter. Stinking dead bodies on freight cars…good God. There’s no mistaking that Lee, in a very primal way, was affected by all this carnage. You can feel it in her sad, shaken, traumatized eyes.
I’m not a fan of Winslet’s crude, twangy American accent, but it doesn’t get in the way. Lee is a militantly feminist film. It’s basically saying that many (most?) men back then were smug, overbearing, entitled dicks. Hell, they still are! Men of the world, let’s all get together on a worldwide Zoom call and slit our throats!
Lee boasts a first-rate supporting cast — Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor.
“Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is.” — from a Lee scene in which Winslet is watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler but is also, obviously, referring to Donald Trump.
Please check out the Lee Miller archives.
