★★★

In the same year Kirsten Dunst took her name as tribute for Alex Garland’s Civil War, seminal mid-century photojournalist Lee Miller receives the biopic treatment, courtesy of Ellen Kuras’ succinctly titled directorial debut. Set between 1937 and ‘45, bookended by a flirtation with ‘77, Lee charts Miller’s journey to the heart of the Second World War and her excavation of the damage it reaped. Her images remain as potent now as ever they were. If not so extraordinary in its own execution, the film warrants credit for the pains it takes stress quite why Miller alone could have taken them.

To similar ends, Lee owes its own existence largely to the strident efforts of a visibly passionate Kate Winslet, who leads the film as Miller herself. An eight year production, including two weeks in which Winslet paid the wages, is a gruelling achievement. Given such a lengthy gestation process, one might expect the film to have secured a stronger foundation beneath its subject’s skin. And yet, for all the eminent watchability of Winslet throughout the film – she is, indeed, terrific – her Miller feels rather too performative. Lee’s Lee is acerbic, damaged and deceptively intuitive but more catnip for a fine actor than rooted character study. 

Perhaps that’s something of the point. Certainly, Josh O’Connor’s framing interviewer struggles to crack the shell. To enquiries as to the role and significance of her photos, 1977’s Miller offers only dismissal. They’re just pictures. Far less than a trip forty years prior suggests. One does not career through an active war zone simply to the end of just pictures. Indeed, our first sighting of the younger Miller finds her stumbling through Saint Malo, over rubble and to a backdrop of all too active dust. A claustrophobic soundscape pulls Miller’s rasping breaths into sharp focus, punctuated by thumping heartbeats. Fear is hot across her face. There is no room for doubt as to what lengths she will go to capture the visual truth of the changing world around her.

Kuras takes us further back still. Back to an age of sun kissed somnambulism, or so it seemed to Miller and her band of Parisian artiste amigos, and a world stumbling into a second Great War. A topless spar with future husband, Roland Penrose, takes Miller to London and to the door of British Vogue. Recruited as a war photographer, having formerly modelled on the other side of lens, Lee’s odyssey into the continent is powered more by her sheer force of nature than the whims of a dated establishment.  There she will unite with fellow photojournalist David Scherman, a Jew in Hitler’s Europe and impressively portrayed by Andy Sandberg, in his dramatic debut. It is Scherman’s experience of Buchenwald and Dachau, so earnestly delivered by Sandberg, that gifts the film its most powerful instance. His reaction to Miller’s now infamous bathtub shoot – in Hitler’s own apartment and unknowingly taken moments after his death – the film’s most wicked.

Sandberg isn’t the only famous face recruited to the passion project but he alone shines through. Certainly, Winslet’s totemic presence here casts shadows. Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough and Alexander Skarsgård each pop up, drafted in for oddly brief appearances, yet find little to do. Skarsgård, most of all, feels rather lost, compounded by a terrifically awful plug for a British accent. Riseborough goes for plummy broke as eccentric Vogue editor Audrey Withers, while Cotillard barely registers as her French counterpart, Solange d’Ayen. It’s the smaller, less showy, roles that ground the piece, such as the interaction Miller has with a fiercely wounded soldier in an American Tent Hospital. She can barely conceal her horror, he merely wants to see how funny he looks. There’s grit.

Curiously, little time is devoted to the impact on Miller’s war years upon her life thereafter. These were years of declining mental health and devastating PTSD. A somewhat clunky late act exchange offers all too brief insight into a childhood trauma that Miller carried with her until her dying days. Such hints at the sobering mindset with which Winslet approached her performance, without extrapolating its dramatic resonance in the wider film. Lee depicts remarkable events in a remarkable life but never quite finds a compelling weave to drive them through. A little less prestige, a little more dirt under the fingernails, and a whole lot more of Miller’s own humanistic insight might have worked wonders with this one.

T.S.