Tea and Infamy Goes to the Movies - Lee: the Movie

By Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

I’d never heard of Lee Miller until I saw an exhibition on her life and work at the San Francisco Museum of Art during the 2009 RWA Conference. I’d gone to the museum to see a Frida Kahlo exhibit, and I wandered over to the Lee Miller exhibit while I was there. I’m glad I did because Lee Miller’s life and work are fascinating. Lee never talked about the war. Instead, she drank and hid the photos in the attic of their home in the country. Eventually, Lee found some measure of peace through cooking. It wasn’t until after his mother’s death that her son saw the photographs in the attic.

It’s no wonder that Kate Winslet spent almost ten years trying to bring Miller’s work as a war correspondent during WWII to the screen. Lee Miller (1907-1977) lived many lives as a model, muse, and photographer. She was born in Poughkeepsie, NY. She was very close to her father, a keen amateur photographer. From him, she learned the rudiments of photography. Lee was his favorite subject, and he often photographed her in the nude.

Her childhood was shattered when she was seven years old when she was raped while staying with a family friend and infected with a venereal disease. Although her parents sent her to a psychiatrist, Lee began to act out. She was expelled from every school she attended in the Poughkeepsie area. 18 Lee moved to Paris for a year to study costume design. When she returned to New York, she became involved with an experimental drama program at Vassar and then moved to NYC to study painting. It was a chance encounter with Conde Nast that led to Lee becoming a model. Although she worked a model for several years, she was never comfortable in front of the camera.

Lee, directed by Ellen Kuras and starring Kate Winslet as the iconic war photographer Lee Miller, delivers a visually stunning but uneven portrayal of a fascinating figure. The film covers Miller’s transition from fashion model to wartime correspondent, focusing on her efforts to expose the atrocities of World War II. The film opens in 1938 in southern France, where Miller stays with friends. She meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), who has been invited to stay. They are instantly attracted to each other, and Miller has moved to England to live with Penrose.

Miller heads to the British Vogue office looking for work from editor-in-chief Audrey Withers. She’s soon hired as Vogue’s official war photographer to take photographs of Britain documenting the Blitz, but Lee is restless and wants to do where the action is. She meets David Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, who becomes her lover. When the British army wouldn’t let Lee accompany them, Miller managed to get accredited with the U.S. Army instead. Following the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, Miller was tasked with reporting on what she was told was the newly-liberated town of Saint-Malo. Lee and Scherman team up to travel on many assignments including the the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

The Positives: Kate Winslet's performance as Miller is undoubtedly the film’s greatest strength. She brings a fierce intensity and vulnerability to the role, capturing the complexities of Miller’s character. Winslet's ability to portray Miller's inner turmoil, especially in scenes depicting the harrowing realities of war, is remarkable. Her Miller is fueled by caffeine, cigarettes, booze, and pills as she and Scherman travel through Europe. The cinematography also deserves praise, as the film captures the beauty and brutality of Miller’s experiences. Winslet doesn’t shy away from playing Miller’s mercurial temperament or her later PTSD. It’s easy to see why Antony Penrose wanted Winslet to play his mother.

Winslet's unflinching portrayal is supported by an excellent ensemble cast, including a surprisingly nuanced performance by Andy Samberg, who plays Life Magazine photojournalist David E. Scherman. While Samberg is best known for his comedic roles, his portrayal of Scherman as Miller’s quieter counterpart offers a thoughtful counterbalance to Winslet's intensity.

The Drawbacks: Where the film falters is in its pacing and storytelling. The narrative jumps between 1977 when Lee is interviewed by an unnamed young man (played by Josh O’Connor) about her war photography and the past. This fragmented structure leaves viewers struggling to grasp a cohesive picture of Miller’s journey. Only at the film's end does the audience learn who the young man is. The biggest problem is that the film is less than two hours long. Miller’s life deserves a miniseries, the Genius treatment that Ron Howard and Brian Glazer gave Einstein, Picasso, Aretha Franklin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The film focuses more on Miller’s relationship with Scherman than her relationship with Roland Penrose (the couple married in 1947 after her divorce from Aziz Eloui Bey). While their relationship provides an emotional grounding, it is portrayed as more of a friendship than a romantic relationship. There is only a brief mention that it might be anything more when Lee brings Scherman home to stay with her and Roland. Alexander Skarsgård is given very little to do in the film. His role seems to be that of the supportive and worried partner rather than a fully realized character of his own.

As Solange d'Ayen, Marion Cotillard has one incredibly moving scene in which Lee finds her cleaning her Paris apartment after liberation. In less than five minutes, Cotillard conveys the heartbreak of a woman whose life has been destroyed by the war. I had to Google who Cotillard was playing because the audience was given very little information.

Solange d’Ayen was the fashion editor of Vogue Paris. Her husband, Jean Maurice Paul Jules de Noailles, was the 6th Duke of Ayen. Jean was a member of the resistance who died in Bergen-Belsen before the end of the war. It would have been nice if the film had briefly mentioned what happened to her after the war as it did for Miller’s other friends, Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch. Lee’s friendship with other female war correspondents like Helen Kirkpatrick is also missing from this film.

One of the most famous photographs of Miller is the one taken in Hitler’s bathtub. The scene in the film doesn’t give the audience enough context. The day that Scherman took that photo was the same day that Hitler committed suicide. Miller and Scherman had just come from the newly liberated Dachau. The dust that Miller wipes on Hitler’s bathmat is the dust from Dachau.

When Miller returns to England, she’s incensed that British Vogue didn’t publish her photos from Dachau and Buchenwald. She runs to the Vogue office and attacks the negatives with a pair of scissors because she’s angry that Withers didn’t fight harder to publish them. In reality, Miller tried to destroy them because, as a darkroom assistant recalled her saying, “I don’t want anyone to have to see what I witnessed, but I’m leaving enough to make sure there’s no doubt about what happened.”

Conclusion: Lee is an ambitious attempt to capture the life of a trailblazing woman, but it doesn’t fully deliver on its potential. Winslet’s commanding performance and the film’s striking visuals are its saving grace, but the uneven storytelling and pacing prevent it from becoming the definitive portrayal of Lee Miller. Fans of historical dramas and biographical films may still find much to admire, but for those seeking a deep exploration of Miller's complex life, Lee may leave them wanting more.

If you want to know more, I suggest reading Antony Penrose’s biography of his mother, The Many Lives of Lee Miller. Another fantastic book is Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II. Dressed for War by Julie Summers is a great biography of Audrey Withers.

The podcast The Rest is History also did a recent episode on Lee Miller.