Kate Winslet produces and stars in director Ellen Kuras’ well-meaning misfire of a war biopic. Here’s our Lee review.
Thanks to a strange quirk in release timing, Lee is the second film featuring a war photographer of that name to grace cinemas in 2024. In Alex Garland’s Civil War, Kirsten Dunst’s character acknowledges her namesake as the profession’s de-facto inspiration. The creator of some of the most iconic images of the Second World War, and whose photography of concentration camp victims alerted the world to the unspeakable horrors taking place behind closed doors, Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller’s life story should be a cinematic no-brainer.
But despite its intention, title and the character’s patronising and ever-present narration, Lee doesn’t seem as interested in the story of its protagonist as in providing a simplified blow-by-blow of the Second World War. Taking the form of a retrospective 1977 interview between Miller (Kate Winslet) and a curious young journalist (a hopelessly overqualified Josh O’Connor), the film asks and answers such hard-hitting questions as “why couldn’t you take a trip to Paris in 1941,” “what was the Blitz all about then,” “what were men and women’s different roles during the war” and “where were Hitler and Ava Braun when the allies reached Berlin” (this isn’t a subtextual Q&A session, by the way – these are all helpfully explained in dialogue).
If Lee were honestly intended to act as some kind of educational tool, that would be one thing. But the 15-rated film otherwise dresses and acts like a bland prestige drama, packed to the rafters with actors – Winslet included – so far above the material they’re given that it would be laughable were a hefty part of the subject matter not so serious. The script only makes a surface-level pass at any of its characters’ motivations, and by its final act, I found myself praying it wouldn’t go to the darkest places the historical narrative needed it to go to because I had so little faith Lee would deal with them competently (in the end, the film’s attempt to explain Lee’s particular reasons for empathising with Holocaust victims feels, at best, tone deaf).
To the film’s credit, this absolutely feels more like a practical failing than a moral one. There’s an earnestness to the story that’s difficult not to admire, and credit where credit’s due to producer Winslet and the team for tackling a tale which absolutely deserves to play out on the big screen (Sky is giving it a limited cinema release in the UK before it heads to video on demand, which I suppose is better than nothing). And when the dialogue-less scenes depicting the holocaust do come, they are undeniably powerful without the script to hold them back. Andy Samberg is particularly good as fellow photojournalist David Scherman in a rare dramatic role despite the material he has to work with.
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But because Miller’s story is so tailor-made for the biopic treatment, it’s only more frustrating that it’s been transformed into a by-the-numbers war film with such a heavy-handed script. For the story of a photographer, too, Lee hardly looks like anything special, tepid shot composition pairing with a bland colour palette to look like something that resembles a ridiculously star-powered TV movie anyway.
Add to that a patronising and overly-simplified tone and a well-meaning but horribly clumsy attempt to delve into some incredibly serious issues, Lee takes a money-shot premise and, to mix metaphors a bit, shoots far wide of the mark. There are so many WWII movies out there already that it takes something very special for a film to stand out from the pack. Lee does so for all the wrong reasons.
Lee arrives in UK & Irish cinemas from the 13th September.
