The best part about the new biographical drama film Lee is undoubtedly the performance of Kate Winslet, whose portrayal of the character of Lee Miller is extremely convincing and praiseworthy. In every other aspect, though, the film fails to deliver on the huge potential that could be expected from a biopic about one of the most daunting and brave women of the 20th century. Adapted from Anthony Penrose’s biography titled The Lives of Lee Miller, the film presents parts of the adventurous life of Lee Miller, who went from a model to a photographer when Europe was ravaged by WWII. Overall, the film is surely interesting to watch, especially for those with any remote interest in history, but it ends up being a forgettable experience with not much depth to it.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Lee begins with a glimpse of a woman running down the streets of some war-stricken city in Europe sometime around 1945, with a camera hanging from her neck. As she spots an interesting subject, a soldier’s boot lying on the road with a band of bullets sticking out of it, and takes a photo of it, there is an explosion very close by, leading to her getting thrown backwards and covered in dust and smoke. As the film shifts forward many years to 1977, we see the same woman, Lee Miller, as an elderly woman, pouring herself a drink in her house in England. She is being interviewed by a young man, but Lee is clearly a bit reluctant to answer his questions, mostly because she finds such interviews to be pointless. She firmly believes that interviews are just a gentler form of interrogation, and she does not seemingly wish to reveal too much about her life and works. The young interviewer even starts off on a wrong note, almost suggesting that Lee had done things in her life only for fame and recognition, which she indirectly states was absolutely not the case.
However, as the woman gradually starts talking to her interviewer, it slowly becomes apparent that her life has been full of dangerous adventures and shows of bravado that definitely deserve to be documented. We are taken back to the past again, in 1938, this time through Lee’s narration, as she describes her carefree life at the time. Having worked as a model and muse for various photographers, including Man Ray, Lee was vacationing at Mougins, France, when she first came across an Englishman named Roland Penrose. The rise of Adolf Hitler was already a matter of discussion among friends at the time, but none of Lee’s artist acquaintances could predict what was about to happen in the coming months. As Lee and Roland began a whirlwind romance, Hitler gained power in Europe and waged war on the rest of the continent.
It was both to get away from Paris, which was becoming a hotbed of political instability, and to move in with Roland, that Lee moved to London. She had always been interested in photography, and now that fewer people wanted her to be the subject of their photographs, since women in their 30s were already considered too old to be models, she showed an interest in pursuing the art from the other side of the camera. Thus, Lee met with a journalist named Audrey Withers and started to work for the Vogue England magazine. With the changing times, Vogue, which had been a fashion magazine, wanted to cover stories from the warfront as well, and Lee signed up to photograph the events, not knowing that the experiences would change her life forever.
What were Lee’s initial experiences as a war photographer?
Lee Miller’s career as a photographer began with capturing scenes from the rapidly changing streets of London, where more and more men were being dispatched to fight in the global conflict. Like most others, she too was shocked and angered by the situation developing in Europe, and Lee was determined to do something about it. Many of her close friends were stuck in Paris, which had already been invaded and occupied by the Nazis, and it left her in an anxious but helpless state. Lee’s first direct interaction with individuals linked to the war was when she photographed the women serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or the ATS, which was basically the female branch of the British army at the time. She eventually started to make requests to be sent to the battlefield to report on the situation, and although Audrey Withers kept reminding her of the rules and conventions, Lee did not give up. After a few attempts, she was told by Vogue that Britain had strict rules about not sending any women journalists to the warfront, temporarily marring her plans.
Since Lee was actually an American citizen, she quickly moved back to the United States and applied for the same role at Vogue magazine in the country. Since the USA did not have any rules with regards to women journalists, she was allowed to go to France and photograph the situation there, finally beginning Lee’s career as a war photographer. Based on what has been shown in “Lee,” the most prominent subject matter in her works was the condition of women amidst warfare, and her best photographs were arguably regarding women on the battlefield. Starting from the ATS workers deployed to control the searchlights that were used to track German bomber planes attacking England aerially to the numerous pilots and doctors that Lee photographed during her time on the battlefield, the condition of women was her most favored subject. The subjects were not necessarily always directly to do with the war either, like when she photographed some underwear and stockings placed to be dried after a hurried wash, which essentially talked about the living conditions of women having to serve in the war.
As a woman living and working in the 1940s, Lee Miller herself had to face a lot of sexism and overall disregard from men. Women were not given access to most parts of the war camps and were restricted to their own zones, and so going to the exact warfront was completely out of the question. “Lee” makes it a point to remind us that while some of the restrictions enforced were out of genuine concern, like the ones followed by the army general, some were born out of sexist inhibitions. The British photographer Cecil Beaton, for example, who was a colleague of Lee at Vogue, was downright intolerant towards women stepping into professional roles and making decisions of their own. When she moved to Saint-Malo to cover the situation there, Lee came across even more harsh and direct conflict before finally witnessing the liberation of Paris. But although the city was now free of Nazi oppression, Lee knew that the war was still ongoing in other parts of the continent, and she remained determined to cover more stories regarding the conflict.
How did Lee end up discovering the horrors of the concentration camps?
While Lee was working as a war photographer, she came across another photojournalist named David E. Scherman, a journalist working for the “Life” magazine. Although she self-admittedly found it very difficult to work with others, Lee had to put almost no effort into becoming friends with David, and the two continued to accompany each other on shoots whenever they could. After the liberation of Paris, she met an old friend, Solange d’Ayen, and learned that her husband, Jean, had been taken away by the Nazis, and there had been no trace of him since then. At the time, the outside world had no idea about the kind of atrocities that thousands of people were being subjected to at the hands of the Nazis inside camps built specifically to torture and kill. As she spoke to more people, Lee realized that hundreds and thousands of people had suddenly gone missing from various parts of the continent, and nobody knew what had happened to them. She even tried to get Audrey Withers to look into the matter as part of Vogue, but the latter could hardly do anything about it.
Eventually, as the Nazis started to lose the war, the press learned about various trains that had been used by the Nazis to transport hordes of prisoners to different parts of Europe, and then Lee and David were let into a concentration camp right after it had been liberated. Despite the extreme physical and mental toll of the experience, the photographers shot images of the heaps of dead bodies found inside the camps and also train coaches. Lee’s photos became some of the very first shots that were published globally to inform people about the horrific genocide that the Nazis had secretly carried out. This experience definitely had a lasting negative impact on Lee’s mind, and the shock and stress that she faced during her time as a war photographer continued to haunt her. She even had to resort to alcohol and drugs later in life, an addiction that started when she was working, and that is also hinted at in the film.
What did Lee reveal about her past?
During Lee’s ending, the titular protagonist finally reveals something personal to her dear friend Audrey after she is infuriated at Vogue for not publishing much of her work. As she has an emotional breakdown, Lee reveals that she had been forced upon by a friend of her father’s when she was a teenager, and the horrid experience kept haunting her till the present time. In fact, this was the very reason that Lee is seen being extremely protective of any woman that she finds to be in danger, starting right from when she sees a young British soldier forcing himself on a French woman after the liberation of Paris. She always remained conscious of the fact that being a woman during wartime was all the more difficult, as she not only had to fear the opponents on the battlefield but also to remain cautious of men and society in general.
One of Lee’s most famous works is a series of photos she took of a French woman being persecuted by society for allegedly consorting with the Germans. Tales of young women wooed by false promises of soldiers from the invading nations are nothing new, and many French women were convinced by German soldiers about their love for them. While some of these claims might have even been true, none of the soldiers remained to keep or break their promises after the Nazis were defeated. As a result, the women were shamed, abused, and tortured by their own countrymen for having betrayed the nation and making plans to settle with the enemies.
Lee Miller was perhaps most disturbed emotionally when she met a young girl in the liberated concentration camp and realized how she had gotten used to a life of extreme torture and abuse. A photograph that she took of this girl led her to the emotional breakdown at Vogue’s London office a few months later, and it was the catalyst that made her open up about her past to Audrey. At least according to her portrayal in Lee, the titular photographer had gotten so involved in covering the stories of others around her that she hardly ever stopped to tell her own story to the world. It was many years later, when a biography on her life was published in 1985, that the full extent of her life and works was revealed to the world.
What does the last scene of the film mean?
In Lee’s ending, the film takes us back to the scene from 1977, where a young man is seen interviewing Lee Miller. Having heard about the unbelievably adventurous life and the passionate career of the woman, the man strangely switches the topic of discussion to motherhood, and Lee admits that she has failed to be a good mother. It is then revealed that the young man taking her interview is her very son, Anthony Penrose. A few scenes later, it is even made clear that the interview session was not real but just something cooked up by the imagination of Anthony, who had found photos and writings of his mother and had created an imaginary dialogue with her about it.
In reality, although Lee Miller lived with her husband and son till her death in 1977, she had never told Anthony about her profession as a war photographer. This was probably because she felt like she could not achieve much in the field of photography, despite having taken numerous iconic war photographs, and it was perhaps one more sign of Lee’s very high expectations of herself. Even if her son did know about what she did in her younger days, he definitely had no idea about the vast extent of his mother’s bravado and work experience. It was only after her death that he found photographs taken by her and some notes that she had written, from which he got to learn about an entirely new side of his mother’s identity. Ultimately, Anthony Penrose not only wrote a detailed biography on Lee’s life and works, but he also honored her in the best way possible by himself becoming a photographer.
