Two American photographers are in Adolf Hitler’s apartment at the very end of World War II when the German leaders are dead. Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) undresses and gets ready to get her photograph taken while in a bath. This moment connects numerous ethical issues in the movie’s “Lee” narrative where she as a model and an artist hides herself while revealing others. She became a war correspondent fighting to explain the unexplainable. It is interesting that after spending the war years as a journalist and photoing the heartbreaking sights of concentration camps, Miller returned to the staged, absurd manner of her earlier years. There she worked with surrealists such as Man Ray and created this very staged photograph moving the photo of Hitler to the edge of the tub and covering the bathmat with mud scraped from her boots. While the audience starts leaving the theater, the picture of the woman and the original is shown as a final goodbye.
After the war, she kept it to herself. The shocking part is that Antony Penrose, Miller’s son, didn’t even know about his mother’s wartime pictures until he chanced upon them in the attic after her demise. There is a set of photographs in which she was quite comfortable exposing herself. In those images, for instance, she is nonchalantly taking off her shirt during a fun lunch outside with some people from the art world. She depicts herself as having finished “being the model, the muse, the ingenue… the only things I was adept at were drinking, having sex, and getting photographed.” She also bares it all in the testimony but only towards the end of the movie where she recounts a deeply shocking moment from her childhood to her editor, who in the scene is played by the extremely talented Andrea Riseborough.
Here, Winslet is emotionally devastated torn between shame, fear, and anger. One of the things she is telling the audience, she wants to tell the story but the conundrum of telling it is too forced. She was taught to never speak. She has the possibility of lying to herself and of a completely confident way to hide someone who was always there. It can also be the most perfect reason to tell someone else’s story: to keep telling instead of confronting the hidden pain. She is a little more on the allow side behind a mask of sympathy she has for the other characters but all of her other masks do the hiding.
That poses a challenge for the film and is probably one of the reasons why the production had difficulty getting the film made for eight years. Miller, who is created for the screen, is seen as gruff, perpetually grim, and emotionless for most of the plot, with little insight into her thinking and feelings. We are told to appreciate an impactful woman’s story that has not been told, but there is an unwelcoming assumption that we have more background knowledge than most of today’s audience has (Would they even know who Cecil Beaton is?). This leads to the narrative lacking depth, grasping my attention less. Instead of, “Who was Miller? What influenced her to do what she did, and what impact did those actions have on her?” it’s more like, “First this happened, then this other thing”. There is a minor twist in this movie Lee at the conclusion when we find out the man attempting to interview her throughout the 1970s (an earnest but sympathetic Josh O’Connor) trying to find out who the woman is. Even then, the reality behind such scenes Lee is not as powerful as the film tries to portray it to be.
Miller is hired as a photographer at British Vogue, at the onset of the war, with the intent to “drive British women into action.” Unlike the other fashion magazines, this one had an agenda of bringing the raw reality of the war to the public through its pages. In the beginning, she covers the fires and the bombs during the Blitz. “It was utter chaos and all I could do was capture every single moment,” she said. After a short while, she is attached to the American troops. Her first instructions were loud and clear: No women were allowed. But she ends up on the other side, where all the women in the service are stationed. She discovers a copy of Vogue with her pictures on the cover. Amongst the photos, she takes one of the women’s nylons strung up to dry by the window a strong symbol of resilience.
First-time director Ellen Kuras is an accomplished cinematographer and has previously worked with Winslet in “A Little Chaos” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” She is a better visual fit with her photography subject than the narrative. The images are strikingly framed, and we can tell how much Miller cares about what she’s doing as she quietly looks down to capture intimate and heartbreaking moments.
She possesses a typical wide level camera for her age, which allows us to look at her appealing face. Unlike Kuras, whose photographer stance is along the lines of intrusive but makes no effort to be a nuisance, Miller does not offer too much intrigue. However, she does understand the delicate balance between maintaining observer status and diving deeper into where the story unfolds.
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