★★★
The same year, Kirsten Dunst took her name in homage to Alex Garland’s film. Civil warseminal mid-century photojournalist Lee Miller gets the biographical treatment, thanks to Ellen Kuras’s succinctly titled debut film. Taking place between 1937 and 1945, ending with a flirtation with 1977, Lee traces Miller’s journey into the heart of World War II and his excavation of the damage it caused. His images remain as powerful as ever. While it’s not that extraordinary in its own execution, the film deserves recognition for the effort it takes, which is why Miller alone could have taken it.
For the same purpose, Lee owes its own existence largely to the strenuous efforts of a visibly passionate Kate Winslet, who herself leads the film as Miller. An eight-year production, including two weeks where Winslet paid salaries, is a grueling achievement. Given such a long gestation process, one might expect the film to have acquired a firmer foundation under the skin of its subject. And yet, for all of Winslet’s eminent visibility throughout the film – she is indeed formidable – her Miller seems rather too performative. LeeLee’s is acerbic, damaged and deceptively intuitive, but more catnip for a good actor than a grounded character study.
Maybe that’s something that matters. Certainly, Josh O’Connor’s interviewer has difficulty breaking the shell. To questions about the role and meaning of his photos, Miller in 1977 offers only rejection. These are just pictures. Much less than a trip forty years ago would suggest. You don’t just run through an active war zone until the end of the footage. Indeed, our first observation of young Miller sees her stumbling in Saint-Malo, over rubble and against a backdrop of far too active dust. A claustrophobic soundscape focuses Miller’s raspy breaths, punctuated by pounding heartbeats. Fear burns on his face. There is no doubt about the lengths she will go to capture the visual truth of the changing world around her.
Kuras takes us even further. Back to a time of sunny sleepwalking, or so it seemed to Miller and his group of Parisian artist amigos, and a world stumbling into a second Great War. A topless argument with her future husband, Roland Penrose, took Miller to London and the doors of British Vogue. Recruited as a war photographer, after modeling on the other side of the lens, Lee’s odyssey across the continent is fueled more by the force of nature than the whims of an outdated establishment. There she will meet her photojournalist colleague David Scherman, Jewish in Hitler’s Europe and impressively played by Andy Sandberg, in his dramatic debut. It is Scherman’s experience of Buchenwald and Dachau, recounted so earnestly by Sandberg, that gives the film its most powerful example. His reaction to Miller’s now-infamous bathtub photoshoot – in Hitler’s own apartment and unknowingly taken moments after his death – is the most perverse in the film.
Sandberg isn’t the only famous face recruited for the passion project, but he alone shines. Certainly, Winslet’s totemic presence here casts shadows. Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough and Alexander Skarsgård each appear, recruited for oddly brief appearances, but don’t find much to do. Skarsgård, of all things, feels rather lost, made worse by a shockingly awful cork for a British accent. Riseborough falls flat as Audrey Withers, Vogue’s eccentric editor-in-chief, while Cotillard barely registers as her French counterpart, Solange d’Ayen. It’s the smaller, less showy roles that ground the play, such as Miller’s interaction with a seriously wounded soldier in an American tent hospital. She can barely hide her horror, he just wants to see how funny he looks. There’s guts.
Oddly little time is devoted to the impact of Miller’s war years on his later life. These were years of declining mental health and devastating PTSD. A somewhat awkward late exchange of acts offers an all-too-brief glimpse of a childhood trauma that Miller carried with her until her final days. Such allusions to the sober frame of mind with which Winslet approached her performance, without extrapolating its dramatic resonance in the film as a whole. Lee depicts remarkable events in a remarkable life, but never quite finds a compelling weave to carry them through. A little less prestige, a little more dirt under the nails and a lot more of Miller’s humanistic vision could have done wonders with this one.
T.S.