‘Lee’ Review: Searching for the Truth
Kate Winslet gives one of the best turns of her career as renowned photojournalist Lee Miller in Ellen Kuras’ feature directorial debut.
The opening minute of Ellen Kuras’ feature directorial debut, Lee, gives us the most significant clue into how she will depict the life of Lee Miller (Kate Winslet), former model and fashion photographer turned photojournalist during World War II. In a scene of raw violence shot with a visceral tactility worthy of Gillo Pontecorvo, Kuras and cinematographer Paweł Edelman shows Miller in the heart of battle, attempting to capture as much as she can from the war-torn town she is assigned to cover. It immediately grabs our attention, priming us subconsciously that the film will see her clinical objectivity being confronted at a moral and ideological level. However, it quickly cuts to an interview she’s giving a journalist (played by Josh O’Connor) about her life, and begins to chronicle her path in a fragmented but linear fashion.
We then alternate between sequences where Miller, cigarette in hand (she smokes in every scene, a Maestro-level of farcical use of cigarettes), recounts her life with the journalist. You’d almost wish the movie wouldn’t do that. Not only is O’Connor woefully miscast and underused, but they dampen some of the film’s most harrowing parts. Worse yet, Kuras gives a “plot twist” to the film’s primary framing device, which seems terribly insulting at face value because it feels like the development we spent with the two was completely worthless. It also wastes time and attachment for the audience, coping out Miller’s story for cheap emotional points.
Her fashion era and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it friendships with Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) are quickly glossed over in favor of a portrait in elongated vignettes of her time covering the war. Of course, it’s not the film’s main focus. However, Lee eventually reunites with the two friends in a liberated France and has to wrestle with the lasting impact the war will have on them. In particular, her final conversation with Nusch and her husband, Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe), causes Lee to perceive this war differently than she initially did. A new desire to document what is truly going on awakens inside her after they talk about people seemingly disappearing in trains and never coming back. Lee’s partner, David Scherman (Andy Samberg), tells them, “People don’t just disappear.” However, Nusch replies, “Je sais pas, I don’t know. They do.”
At the time, none of them knew what was happening beyond the information they would receive on the news and the pictures selectively chosen by editors to not ‘disturb’ the public. The scene has a great emotional impact on Lee’s perception of the war, knowing that there is something that should not only be uncovered but also documented and seen by the public so they never forget the atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich. Unfortunately, the scene's impact on audiences is muddled because the audience never has a chance to fully grasp Lee's close friendship with Nusch, beyond one fleeting scene at the top of the film. Merlant is unsurprisingly great with the limited screentime she has, and the aforementioned conversation is an important scene that breaks the limitations Miller has to set for herself as a journalist documenting the war for Vogue Magazine, who performs a clinical observation of facts and values, as Michael Schudson defines it.
This is where Kuras begins to scratch an itch that only deepens for the protagonist. It’s also where the movie begins to largely improve, chronicling her contrast between her pre and post-discovery of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where she had to reckon with her ideals as a journalist for the first time. Kuras always paints Miller in a humanist light, always taking the time to speak to her subjects and photographing them in a way that never exploits them but tells their story the world deserves to see. However, she always keeps a distance. No matter trying to understand what occurred during the attack on a small French village by the Axis powers, she cannot intervene when the town shaves the head of the women who were swayed and taken advantage of by Nazi spies who pretended to fall in love with them to gain information.
Miller feels the plight of the helpless women, who are now branded as whores and ridiculed by the townsfolk. However, she can’t do anything but photograph their humiliation. It’s the single most significant condemnation of journalistic objectivity I’ve seen since Michael Schudson derided the concept in Discovering the News, stating, “Objectivity is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which, as business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic survival. […] It is a peculiar demand to make of editors and reporters who have none of the professional apparatus which, for doctors or lawyers or scientists, is supposed to guarantee objectivity.”
In the first half of the war, Miller attempts to separate her values from what she sees. She feels pitifully helpless when forced to photograph the abasement of women who didn’t know the men they fell in love with were spies and were taken advantage of. But she feels the best way to talk about them is to photograph their current state at a distance, sticking to the facts and leaving her personal values on the situation behind. However, something changes after she reunites with Paul and Nusch, and it becomes clear she can no longer do the separation taught by her editor, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough). It’s become more than ‘objectively document the war.’ It’s now a search for the truth, not only for her wanting to know what happened to her disappeared friends, but for the world to see what has occurred in this genocide.
It's, of course, shocking when she arrives at Buchenwald and is immediately stricken by the putrid smell in the air while children are idyllically playing in the background (remind you of a specific movie that came out last year?). But it isn’t until she steps into a gas chamber that she not only realizes what has happened but understands how it’s a moral duty for everyone to see – and remember – the horrors millions of people have suffered through or, worse, died. Kuras then reaches that emotional apex when staging Miller’s famous photograph of her bathing in Adolf Hitler’s tub, a visual metaphor for the end of the war but a boldly personal statement that is still dividing historians today. Her approach to objectivity is long gone, and she is not the same free-willed person she was in her art-driven and modeling days.
This contrast is strikingly portrayed by one of Winslet’s best-ever performances, though one distracted by far too many cigarettes. However, her emotional restraint in earlier scenes is second to none, which quickly turns into shock when she discovers the truth of the Holocaust. The subtle shift hits you like a thousand bricks when she realizes that the normative ideals she thought were appropriate while covering the war only shielded her from the truth. They never allowed her to document what she had been observing correctly. Meanwhile, Sandberg gives an against-type turn of raw emotional complexity that takes time to sit with but is equally as devastating when he can’t battle his interior feelings any longer.
Kuras has a deep reverence for Miller’s work and essential historical documentation. When the film focuses on her change of heart, it’s one of the most searing indictments of objectivity you’ll ever see, something Alex Garland wished he did with his unwatchable Civil War (the film’s protagonist is a literal modern-day Lee Miller, but without the conscience and realization that objectivity is based on a failed – and unattainable – normative ideal). Unfortunately, Kuras and editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen constantly intercut moments of immense dramatic power and astute criticism with the aforementioned Josh O’Connor interview, which constantly dilutes the power of Miller’s story within World War II.
Sometimes, a single authorial choice can sink a movie. Lee’s final scene nearly does. It’s bafflingly manipulative, to the point where the audience may feel cheated of spending nearly two hours attempting to peer through one of the most critical photojournalists who ever lived. Lee Miller was not only one of the first (if not the first) photojournalists who showed the world what the Nazis did to the Jewish people but broke multiple glass ceilings and inspired countless other women to follow her path as not only journalists but humanists with an eye for the truth, breaking the profession’s decaying (and misogynist) normative ideals set by a group of men, one story at a time.