Two American photographers enter Adolf Hitler’s apartment just as World War II is ending and the German leaders are dead. Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) takes off her clothes so she can be photographed bathing in Hitler’s bathtub. This moment brings together several of the enigmas at the heart of “Lee,” the story of a real-life woman who revealed herself to others and hid herself, a muse model and artist who works with the artificial and the imaginary that became war correspondent struggling to convey the indescribable. Revealingly, after spending the war as a journalist, photographing harrowing horrors, including some of the earliest photographs of concentration camps, Miller returned to the absurdist, performative aesthetic of his early years. There, he worked with surrealists like Man Ray to create this highly staged photo, moving the photo of Hitler to the edge of the bathtub and scraping mud from his concentration camp boots onto the pristine bath mat. Over the credits we see the recreated photo along with the original.
Once the war was over, he didn’t talk about it. Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, knew nothing of his mother’s wartime photographs until he found them in the attic after her death. He had no problem sharing his body. We see her casually take off her shirt at a cheerful outdoor lunch with friends from the arts community. She describes herself as someone who is done living a life as “the model, the muse, the ingénue… just good at drinking, having sex and taking photographs.” She reveals almost nothing about herself until a scene late in the film in which she tells her editor (the always magnificent Andrea Riseborough) about a deeply traumatic experience from her youth. Winslet is heartbreaking here as she struggles between shame, fear and fury. A part of her wants to tell the story, but she was raised to keep secrets. Perhaps she is so committed to telling the stories of others because of the pain of hiding her own, even from herself. The only other time we glimpse her vulnerable is in a couple of moments when she sympathizes with or protects a woman.
That creates a problem for the film and may be one of the reasons the production struggled for eight years. Miller, as shown on screen, is gruff, grim, and stoic for most of the story, and we rarely get to see what she thinks and feels. Although we are meant to see a never-before-told story of a heroic and impactful woman, we are supposed to come to it knowing more than today’s audiences are likely to know (how many will recognize Cecil Beaton?), leaving the story empty. It’s more about “then this happened and then something else happened” than it is about who Miller was, why she did what she did, and how it affected her. There’s a bit of a twist at the end when we discover the identity of the man who’s been trying to interview her in the 1970s (a serious but empathetic Josh O’Connor), and even then the reality behind those scenes isn’t as shocking as it seems. try to be.
When the war begins, Miller gets a photography job with British Voguewhose aim is to “encourage British women to do their duty” by bringing the urgency of what is happening to the pages of a fashion magazine. At first, he takes photographs of the Blitz, “bombs, chaos, but everyone moved on and I did what I could to capture it.” And then the American forces integrate it. When she is told that women are not allowed, she heads to where the army women are quartered and sees a copy of Fashion with her photographs and takes photographs, including one of the women’s nylon stockings drying on a window, a powerful image of moving forward.
First-time director Ellen Kuras is an accomplished cinematographer who has memorably worked with Winslet on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “A Little Chaos.” She fits better visually with the photographer subject than with the narrative. The images are strikingly framed and we can see how much Miller cares about what he is doing as he silently looks down to capture intimate and heartbreaking moments. He has a camera at waist height, typical of the time, that allows us to see his attentive and magnetic face. Kuras understands the unique position of the photographer as intrusive but unobtrusive, sensitive enough to see where the story is but removed enough to maintain observer status. However, when it comes to learning more about who she was, Miller remains frustratingly unfocused.