LEE

What is is about Lee, Ellen Kuras's bio-pic about the legendary model, photographer and surrealist muse Lee Miller, which makes the film such a narcoleptic experience? It can't be the cinematography or the production values, both of which are stunning and which convincingly capture the physical awfulness of war-time Europe. Kate Winslett, who gamely plays the eponymous heroine, has also received a lot of praise for her portrayal of a woman who was over a decade younger at the time the actress represented her. There is large cast of characters with (potentially) interesting stories of their own. Indeed, Andrea Riseborough gives a near film-stealing turn as Miller's boss at the London end of Vogue magazine. 

There are however, three problems with the film. The script, the work of several hands and loosely based on the monograph of Miller's son Anthony, is absolutely dire and a classic example of artistic editing by a committee. The second is the excessively narrow focus on Miller's personal experience of World War II and the very clunky messaging which is appended to it. Lastly, there is the performance of Winslett herself. Lee Miller is only ever presented in one mode, that of a kick-arse proto-feminist who took a lot of umbrage with male assumptions and was almost perpetually tetchy: she must have been an impossible colleague and employee. This monolithic interpretation of someone so obviously multi-faceted (otherwise, what's the point of giving her an entire film?) is at first off-putting and becomes grindingly dull as the film wears on. Kate stomps about, takes pics, gets what she wants both in bed and on the margins of the battlefield and displays little more than a professional charmlessness throughout. Her revelation towards the very end of the film that she was raped as a small child is delivered in such a way as to suggest she was abstractedly put out rather than catastrophically scarred by the experience. There is no mention of the creepy use her father made of her pubescent years to further his own photographic interests. 

There are really only two moments in the film which properly engage, both entirely visual: her witness of the spiteful and vicious degradation of French women who were accused, after the Liberation, of "horizontal" collaboration with the German enemy and her visit to the concentration camp at Dachau. In both instances Winslett displays a degree of shocked compassion which does not yet obfuscate the moral ambiguity of the act of passively recording human suffering from behind the lens of a camera. The scene of Miller surreptitiously snapping a traumatised young girl at the Nazi death camp, a trauma reflected back in her own face, is especially poignant. Yet in the context of the rest of the film, these moments suggest Miller was only able to engage with the emotions of others when there was the barrier of her camera between them.

Given the extraordinary range of her life, the longueurs in which Kate is filmed smoking a fag; being bolshie about the use (or non-use) of her war photographs; having her breasts (pointlessly) covered in blue paint; or being prosaically interviewed by someone who (spoiler alert) turns out to be her son, could have been better deployed to fill out the extraordinary range of characters to whom Miller was a familiar, from Man Ray to Pablo Picasso. Instead there are soulless interactions with US military types and an almost unbelievably dull portrayal of her relations with her eventual (second) husband Roland Penrose, whom she married in 1947. The surrealist coterie around the husband and wife team of Paul and Nusch Eluard are allowed a few dramatic moments when breasts are bared and conversation arched, but none of that really adds anything of interest or note to the whole.

Of course nowadays, no historical film or bio-pic is complete without some clunking or anachronistic nod towards modern sensibilities. Thus Paul Eluard is made to declaim over a  post Liberation cocktail that the Nazis "Disappeared (sic) Jews, Gays (sic), Communists... and Blacks". Really? Anyone with a passing resemblance to Jesse Owens in Hitlerite Germany had been deported by 1939. There is also the aforementioned dramatic revelation of childhood rape which is, amazingly, parlayed as a sort of 1940's "@Me Too" moment. Could Miller really have believed that, in her opinion, the quotidian exploitation of women (as opposed to children) by men ranked above the Nazi death camps in terms of evil? Or surpassed her own childhood catastrophe? The film is then ended on the rather banal note that while Miller was a great if underappreciated photographer, she was probably a lousy mother. The final box ticked, the credits roll.

It was good to get out and get home.