Seems like it took forever for Lee (2023) to make it to the screen, and, well, it did! This was something of a labor of love for Kate Winslet who had planned to make this movie since 2015. Not only does she star in the film, but she produced it and was heavily involved in casting and financing. Winslet personally covered two weeks’ salary for the cast and crew during pre-production because the original funding fell through. And when the movie was finally done, it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023 but didn’t receive wider theatrical release until the end of 2024!
I’d say the wait was worth it for an engrossing movie about a badass woman determined to tell stories through her art. Lee Miller used photography to show the truth of people’s lives as well as to explore the mind. She had trained with surrealist Man Ray, as well as working as a fashion model, and that gave her a unique perspective, which Kate Winslet strives to bring forth in every scene. One moment Miller is getting girls to wear gas masks for a playful photo, and later she’s listening to concentration camp survivors as she carefully films them, both are important to the story she’s telling.
There’s a framing story about Lee being interviewed in the 1970s, which, I get why it was done that way because Miller’s work was almost forgotten until her son Antony Penrose rediscovered and started writing about and promoting her work after her death. This film used his biography The Lives of Lee Miller as source material. But I found that framing story far less interesting than Lee Miller’s life and work during World War II.
This movie starts right before the war, with a few scenes of international friends cavorting around. This is where Lee meets Roland Penrose, also an artist, who she’ll marry later. They move together to London, where Lee starts working for British Vogue, and that’s how she becomes a war correspondent.
That 1930s pre-war party features the few colorful costumes in the movie, while the rest are necessarily drab uniforms — all tidily done by by Michael O’Connor. This isn’t a frocky flick, but it looks proper.
There’s a few scenes where Lee is working and wearing ’30s/’40s suits.
But when she hits the war zone, Lee doesn’t stay in this sort of “uniform” very long.
Mostly, she gets down and dirty in men’s fatigues, which is also accurate.
The film recreates a famous photo that Lee Miller staged of herself in Hitler’s bathtub. She and photojournalist David Scherman visit Hitler’s private apartment in Munich, which is being used as a private club for Allied officers. Lee takes this bath on April 30, 1945, which is coincidentally the day Hitler committed suicide. It was a nice “fuck you” to nazis that I’m sure we can all agree with today.
Have you seen Lee?
Find this frock flick at:
As a photography nerd, I was so pleased to see that they got the technical aspects of that right. She shoots a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera: the viewfinder is at the top and you have to hold it at waist height and look down into it. Further, the mirrors inside the camera flip the image so framing an image takes practice: your eye says to shift left when you should shift right.
David Scherman (Andy Samberg) has a 35mm Zeiss (Contax, I think).
The irony of German-made cameras in the hands of these two American photojournalists is sweet indeed.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/lee-millers-son-tricked-into-thinking-kate-winslet-is-actually-his-mother-in-new-biopic-due-to-her-skill-with-a-rolleiflex-camera
I enjoyed it as a film but I would have liked it if they’d cut the framing part in favour of more of a look back to Lee’s work in photography before she became a photojournalist. Looking up her history, it made sense why she was so frustrated in the film at being passed over or overlooked in favour of male photographers (because of her history of artists like Man Ray (allegedly) stealing her work and passing it off as their own), but I didn’t really understand that detail until I learned more about her so in just viewing the film itself, it came across as slightly anachronistic rah rah feminism.
Agreed about the framing device – I feel like it was done purely bec. her son was the one who has promoted her work since she died.
“Lee & another woman go topless, which seems a bit random.” *
I haven’t seen the film yet– so I don’t know how the scene was presented, or if the people at the party were identified– but Lee Miller was previously an integral part of the Surrealist crowd, collaborating with Man Ray on photography and appearing in Jean Cocteau’s first film BLOOD OF A POET.
Since Miller is known to have met Roland Penrose (himself a Surrealist painter) during a 1937 reunion with her former cohorts, a couple of topless women in that context probably isn’t that “random.”
(Not to mention her earliest instruction in photography was from her father, who shot nudes of her as a teenager.)
The toplessness is at a picnic, the one pictured, & you can see the bare shoulders of one of the women. Lee sits down, takes her top off, then when Roland arrives, covers up a little. Nobody says anything about it, & it’s just an odd bit thrown in.
Roland was a new acquaintance that day so I took it as a shy move to cover up till she knew him better. Going topless at picnics and beaches was and still is pretty common for Europeans, especially among friends.
Also, Alexander Skarsgard was present, so spontaneous evaporation of … shirts … is probably a hazard they were obliged to work with (At least they were able to work it into the plot of the scene by treating the incident as a case of the ladies showing that they were interested, but didn’t want to go all the way on a first date).😉
Also, Holy Moley, Kate Winslet has finally found a more Viking-looking onscreen love interest than Mr Daniel Craig!
Wow! Thanks for this review! I vaguely remember this movie being on my radar at some point, but I completely forgot about it. Kate Winslet is an AMAZING actress! I have every confidence that she’s amazing in this movie! Thanks to your, “This Frock Flick is available at…” feature, I went straight to one of my streaming services and added to my watchlist!
This was definitely one of the better biopics I’ve seen, the slightly clunky framing device aside. I was really pleased to discover that most of the film’s big iconic moments were directly based on Lee Miller’s own photographs, rather than being made up for drama. (I always find it disappointing when I watch a biopic and find out most/all of the “big moments” are complete fiction – cf. Hidden Figures.)
It was also interesting to see Andy Samberg in an entirely serious role as Miller’s fellow photojournalist David Scherman – I know him mainly as Detective Peralta in police comedy Brooklyn 99 and part of the band The Lonely Island.