Winter 2025
An eye for a story
Lee
Directed by Ellen Kuras Starring Kate Winslet Cinemas and streaming Reviewed by John L. Walters
Lee Miller (1907-77) was many things: model, muse, artist, photographer, writer, chronicler of twentieth-century artists and (eventually) Lady Penrose. This multiplicity was implied by the title of The Lives of Lee Miller, a biography by her only son Antony Penrose, who grew up, like many boys, with only a sketchy sense of his mother’s achievements.
The movie Lee (directed by Ellen Kuras) chooses to concentrate on the relatively short period when Miller, working for British Vogue, found her métier as a war correspondent. As the Second World War ground to an end, she made a series of extraordinary scoops, sometimes in tandem with Life magazine photographer David E. Scherman. The last scraps of fighting at St Malo; field hospitals; an early use of napalm; the liberation of Paris; Hitler’s house (and bathtub) in Munich; the group suicide of an SS officer and his family; the unspeakable horrors of the Dachau concentration camp as US forces walked in to find corpses and skeletal survivors.
In the movie, Kate Winslet portrays Miller as a cool professional, her Rolleiflex camera an ever-present extension of her hands and eyes, with just the right combination of empathy and detachment to find a story that could work in the pages of a magazine.
Miller’s early 1940s pictures of air raid servicewomen, bombed buildings and damaged statues had already shown her Surrealist eye for a picture that could be both quirky and profound. The images of conflict and defeat added depth, compassion and anger to this singular vision.
Lee omits Miller’s eventful early life and her final decades at Farleys House in Sussex where she became an obsessive competition enterer, gourmet cook and classical music fan. The framing narrative, an imaginary conversation with Antony, is not entirely successful.
Yet the movie conveys the intensity of Miller’s war years with conviction, and cleverly recreates the moments, from both sides of the lens, that resulted in some of her most celebrated and vivid images.
John L. Walters, Eye editor, London
First published in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025
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