Lee review: Kate Winslet’s photographer biopic fails to capture the unique essence of this woman who intrigued, captivated and infuriated in equal measure writes ALEXANDRA SHULMAN

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In 2003 the playwright Sir David Hare unveiled a blue plaque at 21 Downshire Hill, the London house where the glamorous and intrepid photographer Lee Miller lived with her husband Roland Penrose.

David Hare had written a screenplay of Miller’s life, in which first Nicole Kidman and then Cate Blanchett were slated to play the lead. Sadly this was never produced.

Instead, we have Lee, the biopic with Kate Winslet in the title role which opens in cinemas on Friday (Sept 13th) — a film which fails to capture the unique essence of this woman who intrigued, captivated and infuriated in equal measure.

Lee, directed by Winslet’s choice of Ellen Kuras, focuses chiefly on Miller as the unflinching war photographer she undoubtedly was, a woman who had become a legendary member of the Vogue canon of photographers and is still today a role model for many young women who enter the male dominated arena of war reportage.

But she was also a refined beauty, model, muse and student of the surrealist Man Ray, lover of Picasso and countless other men, and a photographer with a unique eye not only on the battlefield but also for portraits and fashion.

It is the mixture of her patrician beauty, romances with some of the most fascinating men of the age, and extraordinary war photography that has garlanded her with iconic status.

Aged 19, Miller was pulled from the path of an oncoming car in New York by Vogue’s publisher Conde Nast, who fast-tracked her modelling career, encouraging leading photographers of the day like Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene to use her.

But when one of these images ended up as Kotex sanitary towel advertisement in 1928, in a typical display of furious independence Miller packed up and went to Paris, armed only with an introduction to artist Man Ray.

Winslet plays Miller, as a ball-breaking, bad-ass woman, taking on all comers with a gruff quip and a flick of a cigarette. She is confrontational and exhausting while the real Miller, I believe, was inscrutable and enigmatic, an icy sphinx who had been raped at the age of seven by a family friend, and whose father Theodore took nude pictures of her throughout her life.

Her only son, Anthony Penrose, wrote of the effect this had on his mother: ‘Her detached gaze suggests a numbed blankness of dissociation… this dissociation served her well in later life and made her irresistible to men looking for a challenge in romance.’ He went on to attribute her extraordinary fearlessness to this, while another photographer and lover, David Scherman, who took a famous image of Miller in Hitler’s bath the night of Hitler’s suicide, said: ‘Lee Miller was never afraid of the evil that men can do.’

Before the war, Miller was a pivotal figure in the Surrealist movement, often incorporating a playful, surreal quality in her own work.

Lee, directed by Winslet’s choice of Ellen Kuras, focuses chiefly on Miller as the unflinching war photographer she undoubtedly was

Picnic, one of my favourite Miller photographs, taken in the South of France in 1937, is of a group of friends; the artists Nusch and Paul Eluard, Miller’s husband Roland Penrose, the surrealist Man Ray and his beautiful Creole friend and model Ady Fidelin.

The two women with neat, suntanned breasts lie languidly and happy in the sun on the grass. The film attempts to reconstruct this moment but utterly fails to capture the indolence and sensuality of the image.

Kate Winslet arrives, plonking a big bowl of food at the table, stripping off her shirt to reveal her pale, full breasts, before being introduced to her future husband Penrose, who appears out of nowhere. Winslet’s abrasive and unattractive greeting is the complete opposite of the silent but effective restraint Miller would have used in life and work.

In a recent interview, Kate Winslet has mentioned how she insisted on keeping her ‘belly rolls’ in frame, but in a scene where she is wearing a polka dot bikini top, it’s not her physique that lets down the accuracy of the film — the real Miller was as slender and fine-limbed as a gazelle – but Winslet’s huffing and puffing on a minor cliff walk. Surely a woman who had braved the battle for St Malo wouldn’t find a coastal stroll in the South of France such an ordeal.

But she was also a refined beauty, model, muse and student of the surrealist Man Ray, lover of Picasso and countless other men

By 1944, Miller is married to Penrose and has moved to London, becoming a regular photographer for British Vogue, where, frustrated by being confined to fashion and portraits, she tries to persuade the editor, Audrey Withers to send her to cover the war in Europe.

Withers had been appointed editor of the magazine in 1940 and remained in the post for 20 years. She had a background in writing and editing copy and although not a fashion expert herself oversaw the magazine over the decades it became the influential magazine of today. Her Vogue made world famous names like Norman Parkinson and Anthony Armstrong Jones.

The portrayal of Withers, is another massive false step in the film. Andrea Riseborough (an actress who might have made a better Lee in my opinion) plays her as a tremulous and uncertain character, bullied by photographer Cecil Beaton, who, mystifyingly, is shown in the Vogue offices, seemingly in charge of magazine layouts.

But Withers was no such woman. She was hugely intelligent, opinionated and pragmatic, with an acute sense of global politics, and led the magazine through the war, undeterred by the magazine’s bombed office, paper shortages and a constant battle with the all-powerful American Editor Elsa Woolman Chase, who frequently failed to appreciate how British readers might have a different attitude to events.

Winslet plays Miller, as a ball-breaking, bad-ass woman, taking on all comers with a gruff quip and a flick of a cigarette

However, Withers is unable and unwilling to send Miller to the front, so eventually Miller convinces the US Army to give her military accreditation and orders her uniform from Savile Row.

As only one of two women photographers granted access to the horrors unfolding, she forces herself to record the grim aspects of the French liberation, amputations in the field hospitals and the famous images of the piles of bodies in the death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau.

When Miller dispatches her devastating haul of images to Vogue with the message ‘I implore you to believe this is true’, Withers knows they will never get through the censors. 

The war is over. The UK government had no interest in Vogue dwelling on the past, preferring Lee instead to be given stories like 10 Ways with a Headscarf, so Withers sent them instead to US Vogue.

Lee is distraught when she realises British Vogue won’t publish the pictures and, in the film, rushes into the office to hysterically cut up the negatives in the filing cabinet, bursting into tears and then in a most unlikely move, confides to Withers, her childhood rape.

No biopic can include the whole story, but again and again, the film manages to paint events in the clunkiest of manners, avoiding any of the style and nuance that made Miller exceptional

It is on record that it was one of Withers’ great regrets that she didn’t publish the images.

No biopic can include the whole story, but again and again, the film manages to paint events in the clunkiest of manners, avoiding any of the style and nuance that made Miller exceptional. 

Only when Winslet portrays the photographer at the end of her days, a melancholy and disappointed drunk dying of cancer does she come into her own.

There, surrounded by photographs, and the well-written dispatches she also filed, does she movingly use silence and small gestures in her confrontation with her estranged son, to say so much about how she feels — how she felt — about her extraordinary and so often traumatic life.