Lee * * *

Kate re-enacts Lee and THAT photo

Lee is the story of Lee Miller who was a photographer in WWII.  She is mostly known for the photographs she took in the closing stages of the war: The liberation of France, showing not just the joy of the people but the shaming of young women who had fraternized with the Germans.  

With fellow photographer David Scherman she was one of the first to go to Dachau to photograph the unspeakable horror of it.  

Nearly every great news photojournalist is known by one iconic image - hers is the photograph of herself in Adolph Hitler's bath in his abandoned apartment.

The film stars Kate Winslet who is also the producer. Lead actors are often given "producer"credit. Sometimes they don't even know about it until the credits roll, but Winslet really was the producer of this film.  She started working on it ten years ago.  For some reason she appointed Ellen Kuras as the director. Kuras is a very fine DOP but she is not so experienced as a director and perhaps her cautiousness shows.  Further, the screenplay was written once, then re-written by someone else, then finally one more time by a fashion journalist who worked for Vogue magazine and also has a personal interest in Lee Miller.

Despite (or because of) the redrafts it is unfortunate that Lee is rather a plodding film.  Especially when you compare it to gripping biopics such as  The Apprentice, or Steve Jobs or Stan and Ollie.

It covers Lee Miller's life from the time she abandoned modelling and became a sexually liberated social layabout in France, to her years in the war working for Vogue and then as a freelance photographer with a long suffering husband (Alexander Skarsgard).

She could also be a rather cantankerous woman especially as she got older.  The story is told with her in an interview in the 1970's as she reluctantly and grumpily recalls her past.   

Her interest in photography commenced when she was a model.  She decided what the photographer was doing was more interesting than what she had to do as a clothes horse.

Her connections with Vogue and the Parisian artistic elite gave her a good start, and there is no doubt she was talented.

Although I found it hard to believe she was ever a svelte fashion model (Winslet doesn't really have that look), her overall performance as Lee Miller is pretty good, especially in her war photography years. 

Yet, other than the excellent recreation of time and place, and an interesting twist at the end regarding the person who is interviewing her, the film came across as somewhat pedestrian as it ticks off each event in a checklist manner.