Kate Winslet’s Transfixing Performance Makes ‘Lee’ Vivid and Unforgettable

Great biopics about great people demand great writing and great centerpiece performances. The splendid film Lee, a riveting, honorable and comprehensive chronicle about the extraordinary life, work and importance of the impactful, world-famous photojournalist Lee Miller, with a sensational focus on the truth by Oscar winner Kate Winslet in the starring role, gets both. Everything in this exemplary picture spells the kind of quality I haven’t seen on the screen since Oppenheimer.

Framed by an interview with a British journalist shortly before she died in 1977, the narrative uses the celebrated photos she took of the horrors of World War II to serve as guideposts to her reputation as a pioneer and fearlessly honest truthteller about what she saw and experienced, reported with a unique style, bringing the facts of war to a public readership in, among other places, the pages of British Vogue—read by a league of fans who were otherwise hugely unconscious and unaware of the futility of war. She used her camera as her companion to reveal crimes of humanity that awakened people to atrocities they never otherwise suspected.  

A native American from upstate New York who first achieved fame as a fashion model, Miller settled in France in 1938 and became a photographer under the guidance of her mentor, the illustrious Man Ray, then moved to London, married art dealer-poet-leader of the British surrealist art movement Roland Penrose (played by uber-handsome Alexander Skarsgard), and teamed up with scruffy, unconventional fellow photographer David Scherman (solidly, supportively played by Andy Samberg) to expose the ravages of the approaching war in the pages of Life magazine. Defying the odds, among the stories they covered that grabbed worldwide attention were the fight against British traditions that refused to send women to the European front even as England itself was being bombed, photographing the first uses of napalm, the shame of French women with shaved heads who had served as collaborators, and the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. Even when she had the chance to go home, Lee moved closer to the German border, capturing for posterity images of amputee soldiers, murdered children and dead Red Cross workers. She and partner Scherman were the first journalists to record the liberation of the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, as well as the devastation left behind in the streets of Berlin by the Reich. These images—some preserved in their originality, but also recreated brilliantly by cinematographer-turned-director Ellen Kuras—include the legendary photo that appeared in Life magazine after Lee, using her charm and beauty as a familiar fashion icon, bribed her way into Adolf Hitler’s private living quarters, stripped naked and posed in the Fuhrer’s bathtub after his suicide.  

Driven to the edge of insanity by what she saw and recorded for history, Lee Miller retired from public life after the war, but she was restored to legendary global status after she died in 1977 by the efforts of her son (another superb characterization by Josh O’Connor) and every important aspect of her story’s important significance is tensely, captivatingly preserved in the mesmerizing screenplay by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume. Enough cannot be said about the film or Kate Winslet’s transfixing performance in it—irritating, admirable, challenging, sometimes unlikeable, always heroic—as she elevates the complex personality conflicts of Lee Miller into a cohesive, resplendent, three-dimensional whole. Filmed in England, Hungary and Croatia, Lee is a vivid and unforgettable tribute to one of the bold women who devoted her life to the penetration of male dominance to change the way we see the world. Don’t even think about missing it.