In 2003, playwright Sir David Hare unveiled a blue plaque at 21 Downshire Hill, the London house where the glamorous and intrepid photographer Lee Miller lived with her husband Roland Penrose.
David Hare had written a script based on Miller’s life, in which Nicole Kidman and then Cate Blanchett were to play the lead roles. Unfortunately, the script was never released.
Instead, we have Lee, the biopic starring Kate Winslet that opens in theaters Friday (September 13), a film that fails to capture the unique essence of this woman who intrigued, captivated and infuriated in equal measure.
Lee, the biopic starring Kate Winslet that hits theaters Friday (September 13), fails to capture the unique essence of this woman.
Directed by Winslet’s Ellen Kuras, Lee focuses heavily on Miller as the stalwart war photographer she undoubtedly was, a woman who had become a legendary member of the Vogue canon of photographers and who remains a role model for many young women entering the male-dominated field of war reportage.
But she was also a refined beauty, a model, a muse and pupil of the surrealist Man Ray, a lover of Picasso and countless other men, and a photographer with a unique eye not only for the battlefield but also for portraiture and fashion.
It is the mix of her patrician beauty, her romances with some of the most fascinating men of the era and her extraordinary war photography that has given her iconic status.
At age 19, Miller was pulled out of the path of an oncoming car in New York by Vogue editor Conde Nast, who accelerated her modeling career, encouraging leading photographers of the day, such as Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene, to use her.
But when one of these images ended up as an advertisement for Kotex sanitary napkins in 1928, Miller, in a typical display of fierce independence, packed his bags and left for Paris, armed only with a presentation by the artist Man Ray.
Winslet plays Miller, a tough, larger-than-life woman who takes on anyone who approaches her with a brusque joke and a cigarette. She is confrontational and exhausting, whereas the real Miller, I think, was inscrutable and enigmatic, an icy sphinx who had been raped at age seven by a family friend and whose father Theodore took nude photographs of her throughout her life.
Her only son, Anthony Penrose, wrote of the effect this had on his mother: “Her distant gaze suggests an indifference numbed by dissociation… this dissociation served her well in later life and made her irresistible to men seeking a challenge in romance.” He went on to attribute her extraordinary bravery to this, while another photographer and lover, David Scherman, who took a famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathroom on the night of Hitler’s suicide, said: “Lee Miller was never afraid of the evil that men can do.”
Before the war, Miller was a pivotal figure in the Surrealist movement and often incorporated a playful, surreal quality into his own work.
Lee, directed by Winslet’s Ellen Kuras, focuses primarily on Miller as the unflinching war photographer she undoubtedly was.
Picnic, one of my favorite Miller photographs, taken in the South of France in 1937, is of a group of friends: the artists Nusch and Paul Eluard, Miller’s husband Roland Penrose, the surrealist Man Ray, and their beautiful Creole friend and model Ady Fidelin.
The two women, with tanned and well-groomed breasts, lie languidly and happily in the sun on the grass. The film tries to reconstruct this moment, but fails to capture the indolence and sensuality of the image.
Kate Winslet arrives, plops a large bowl of food on the table, removes her shirt to reveal her pale, fleshy breasts, before being introduced to her future husband, Penrose, who appears out of nowhere. Winslet’s brusque, uninviting greeting is the complete opposite of the quiet but effective restraint Miller would have used in life and work.
In a recent interview, Kate Winslet mentioned that she insisted on keeping her “little belly rolls” in the frame, but in a scene where she wears a polka-dot bikini top, it’s not her physique that detracts from the film’s accuracy (the real Miller was as slender and lean as a gazelle), but Winslet’s huffing and puffing on a short cliffside stroll. Surely a woman who had braved the battle of Saint Malo wouldn’t find a walk along the coast of southern France so trying.
But she was also a refined beauty, a model, muse and student of the surrealist Man Ray, lover of Picasso and countless other men.
In 1944, Miller marries Penrose and moves to London, where she becomes a regular photographer for British Vogue, where, frustrated at being confined to fashion and portraiture, she tries to persuade the editor, Audrey Withers, to send her to cover the war in Europe.
Withers had been appointed editor of the magazine in 1940 and remained in the post for 20 years. She had experience in writing and copy editing and, although she was not a fashion expert, she oversaw the magazine over the decades, but it became the most influential magazine of today. Her Vogue made names like Norman Parkinson and Anthony Armstrong Jones famous.
Withers’ performance is another major misstep in the film. Andrea Riseborough (an actress who, in my opinion, could have made a better Lee) plays her as a shaky, insecure character, intimidated by photographer Cecil Beaton, who, disconcertingly, turns up at the Vogue offices, apparently in charge of the magazine’s layout.
But Withers was not that woman. She was a highly intelligent, opinionated and pragmatic woman with a keen sense of global politics, and she ran the magazine through the war, undaunted by the bombings of the office, paper shortages and the constant battle with the all-powerful American editor Elsa Woolman Chase, who often failed to appreciate that British readers might have a different attitude to events.
Winslet plays Miller, a tough, tough-guy who takes on everyone who approaches her with a sharp joke and a flick of a cigarette.
However, Withers is unable and unwilling to send Miller to the front, so Miller eventually persuades the US Army to grant him military accreditation and orders his uniform from Savile Row.
As one of only two female photographers allowed access to the unfolding horrors, she is forced to record the grim aspects of the French liberation, the amputations in field hospitals and the famous images of the piles of corpses at the Buchenwald and Dachau extermination camps.
When Miller sends her devastating haul of images to Vogue with the message, “I implore you to believe this is true,” Withers knows they will never make it past the censors.
The war was over. The British government was not interested in Vogue focusing on the past and preferred Lee to receive articles such as 10 Ways to Wear a Headscarf, so Withers sent them to Vogue USA.
Lee becomes distraught when she realises that British Vogue will not publish the photographs and, in the film, she runs to the office to hysterically cut up the negatives in the filing cabinet, bursting into tears and then, in a highly unlikely move, confides in Withers about the rape she suffered as a child.
No biopic can cover the whole story, but time and again, the film manages to portray events in the most clumsy of ways, avoiding any of the style and nuance that made Miller exceptional.
It is on record that one of Withers’s greatest regrets was not publishing the images.
No biopic can ever tell the whole story, but time and again, the film manages to paint events in the most clumsy of ways, avoiding any of the style or nuance that made Miller exceptional.
It is only when Winslet portrays the photographer at the end of her days, a melancholic and disillusioned drunk who is dying of cancer, that she reaches her fullness.
There, surrounded by photographs and the well-written dispatches she also submitted, she movingly uses silence and small gestures in her confrontation with her estranged son, to say much about how she feels—how she felt—about his extraordinary and often traumatic life.
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