“I was good at drinking, having sex, and taking pictures. But I was done with all that,” Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) tells us in a voice over at the start of “Lee.” But the woman who had lived a wild life with Surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris during the 1930s was far from finished taking pictures. When Hitler invaded Europe, British Vogue editor Audrey Withers challenged Lee, who by then was a fashion photographer for the magazine, to contribute photographs that would encourage the women of Britain to do their duty. And Lee did so, displaying special sensitivity for the vulnerable women who survived the London Blitz.
Other women photographers had recorded desperate times. During the Depression, Dorothea Lange famously photographed Migrant Mother. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, captured Tennessee mountain woman Mrs. Ramsey. And Life magazine’s star photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s methods inspired Miller’s later field work.
Now, during the perilous days of WWII, Lee was determined to record what was going on. She asked her British Vogue editor to send her to Europe as a war correspondent. When the powers that be put the kibosh on that idea, Lee turned to American Vogue, and Lee was off to Normandy. The images she captured there are breathtakingly horrific: The attack on St. Malo: the subsequent German surrender, the treatment of women deemed “collaborators.”
Later, with another American photographer, David Scherman (Andy Samburg), by her side, Lee continued to chronicle the war that continued on after Paris was liberated. They drove 500 miles, into “the worst of it all.” Pictures of entire German families who committed suicide, train cars filled with corpses, the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp, and—one of her most famous works—a portrait of Lee in Hitler’s bathtub.
It was a tremendous disappointment for Lee when British Vogue wouldn’t print her photographs. Again, American Vogue came through, publishing the breathtakingly harrowing pictures under the headline, “Believe This!” One could argue that only a background in Surrealism could have prepared Lee for what she saw.
Throughout, Lee is determined and daring, a tough cookie who never displays vulnerability. And here is the flaw in the film. The main character remains distant to us, with the central issue of her motivation not adequately addressed. There is a reference to a childhood rape, late in the story, but the filmmakers should have made more of this. Not only did Lee suffer the lifelong effects of gonorrhea transmitted during the rape, but she also endured years of abusive behavior at the hands of her father. Lee survived by turning her extraordinary beauty–the very feature that lured predators–into a protective shell, parlaying her looks into a career as a high fashion model, then to reel in a famous artist who taught her about photography. She kept up her tough front fueled by booze and pills. And the amount of cigarette smoke swirling through every scene in this movie may have you gagging by its end.
The frame story, in which Lee is being interviewed about that time, ends with a clever twist that reveals how the bulk of Lee’s extraordinary collection of photographs chronicling the horrors of the Second World War were only brought to light when they were found in her attic following her death.
If you want to read more about Lee Miller, here are two historical fiction offerings, and a biography written by Miller’s son:
The Beautiful American, Jeanne Macken
The Age of Light, Whitney Scherer
The Lives of Lee Miller, Antony Penrose
