On April 30 1945, photojournalist Lee Miller made one of the Second World War’s most staggering photographs. The now iconic image shows Miller in Hitler’s abandoned flat in Munich, bathing topless in his bathtub. A portrait of the dictator is propped against the tiles and Miller’s boots sit symbolically on the bath mat caking dirt from the Dachau concentration camp she had visited earlier that morning into the fabric. It’s a scene recreated with meticulous attention to detail in Lee and one of many moments that illustrate her power as a photographer in this well intentioned, but lacklustre drama.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, Miller is a woman far more people should know about. She had a long and varied life, beginning her career as a coveted fashion model in New York before turning her gaze behind the camera, moving to Paris and becoming embedded in the Surrealist art scene. She went on to set up her own photography studio in New York, moved to Egypt where she lived for a time with her Egyptian husband, and in her later years moved to Sussex and became a celebrity gourmet chef.
Wisely, the film focuses on just one of her diverse lives: her almost accidental career as a correspondent for British Vogue during World War II. Kate Winslet, who also produces, is a remarkable Miller, deftly portraying the light and shade of her mercurial personality and her fiery tenacious spirit.
We meet a wine-swigging, carefree, bohemian Miller in Paris in 1937 as she begins an affair with her future husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). Winslet brings a seriousness to the photographer when she moves to London with Penrose as the threat of war looms and she begins to pester Vogue editor Audrey Withers – played by Andrea Riseborough – to give her a job as a photographer.
The film is packed full of moving recreations of some of her most famous images which really show off director Ellen Kuras’s chops as an Oscar-nominated cinematographer (Lee is her directorial debut). We see a smoke-filled street with a sign pinned to a tree reading ‘unexploded bomb’ – a recreation of Miller’s ‘You Will Not Lunch in Charlotte Street Today’. After an air raid, we watch Miller determinedly direct models to pose in a bomb shelter for her famous portrait ‘Fire Masks’, and we see her tiptoe through a nurse’s billet, focusing her lens on the delicate underwear hanging in the window. ‘Only a woman could have taken these,’ Withers remarks, and all the painstakingly copied images serve as a reminder of how necessary Miller’s work was; that her battle to become a female combat photographer – which was banned at the time – was so desperately needed to show a side of the war that only a woman could tease out.
It plods between different incidents in Miller’s life without any depth
It’s a shame the same attention to detail isn’t given to the film’s side characters. We never really get under the skin of David E Sherman, a Jewish-American photojournalist played by Andy Samberg, who teamed up with Miller on their wartime assignments and took her famous portrait in Hitler’s bath. While the harrowing story of Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), Miller’s traumatised Parisian friend from her time hanging out in Surrealist circles feels wedged into the action.
Even her relationship with her husband – played unconvincingly by Skarsgård, who never quite nails the role of the avant-garde English gent – seems half-hearted. It leaves Lee feeling two-dimensional, a film that plods between different incidents in Miller’s life without any meaty, emotional depth to guide us.
Despite this, it’s hard not to be moved by some of the scenes Miller captures: a woman accused of Nazi collaboration being sheared of her hair in public; a soldier in bed encased in white plaster; bodies piled over each other in just-liberated concentration camps – all harrowingly preserved for posterity on Miller’s little Rolleiflex camera. As an argument for how urgent and powerful photography can be, and the debt we owe Miller for the lengths she went to take those images, Lee wins hands down.
In UK cinemas Sep 13 and US theaters Sep 27.