Lee (2024) Film Review: Portrait of a Fierce Woman

In Lee, Kate Winslet brings famed war photographer Lee Miller to life with a ferocious energy, capturing the spirit of a woman who refused to let others define her.

However, the world may have never have had these photographs if it weren’t for her son, Anthony Penrose’s, efforts to preserve his mother’s historical photos following her passing in 1977.

While Lee was a trailblazer in war photojournalism, her photos were seen as too raw and upsetting for her publication, British Vogue. She fought for her images to be published but ultimately lost the battle. Lee Miller never told her story in her own words, following a childhood darkened by abuse; her post-traumatic stress disorder greatly contributed to her habitual secrecy. Kuras’ has made it her mission to ensure Lee Miller’s heroic and historical contributions to WWII will not fade with history with her brilliant biographical drama, Lee. 

By the time the audience meets Lee Miller (Kate Winslet, of The Regime), she is past her modeling days. She’s been a model, a muse, an actress and now at the age of 31, she seems content living a life free of obligation. The film begins chronicling Lee’s life in the south of France in 1938. She’s staying with her close group of artist friends whose biggest concerns at present are whether they are going to have a drink before they go for a pre-dinner swim or afterward. On this fateful trip, Lee meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård, of Infinity Pool) who matches her ferocious energy and withstands her almost vicious line of questioning. Roland proves to have the ability to go toe-to-toe with Lee and quickly they become inseparable. During this time the only thing Lee has held onto from her past career is her passion for photography.

While on this trip, Hitler and his growing army are on the periphery of the group’s mind. There is an acknowledgment of the vile hatred he’s spewing and the following he is mounting, but his efforts seem far off and, in the view of those present on the trip, unpleasant to discuss. The rest of the group plans to leave for Paris at the end of the trip but Roland manages to convince Lee to come home to London with him. 

The film picks up two years later in 1940s London, where Lee has grown restless, seeing the effects of the war firsthand. She gets a position as a photographer at British Vogue and begins to take photos of London in the midst of the war. Her photographs mainly depict the way life has gone on with the war persisting. She takes photos of children playing on abandoned cars and typically busy streets empty after an air raid but eventually feels the need to do more for the war efforts. After being denied by British authorities credentials as a war correspondent, she turns to American authorities, who grant her access and give her the ability to go into the field and seek out the truth of what is happening in this war. 

In her pursuit, she teams up with David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg, of Self Reliance), a fellow American correspondent for LIFE magazine. Together, the two of them seek out entry into the heart of the war. Though often barred by gender biases, after seeing the brutality of the war Lee makes it her mission to photograph what is really going on as she knows first hand no one understands the true horrors that are happening. 

The film is framed through the lens of an interview between Lee Miller and a young journalist (Josh O’Connor, of Challengers) who is curious of the story behind Lee’s time in the war. The genius of this format is that the central and looming question of the film posed by the young journalist is “How did you all not know what was going on?”. While the journalist believes he is putting Lee directly in the hot seat, and in all honesty asking the question so many who were not alive and present during WWII have wondered, this perfectly queues up the film to show why Lee Miller and her work were so important. 

Kuras’s direction is far more intentional than meets the eye. The beginning sequence of Lee and her friends in the south of France and the years she spent photographing the war’s effects in London are crucial to showing how life went on during the war for some and completely destroyed life for others. It also underlines why her photographic evidence of the Holocaust, specifically of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, was so important to show those not impacted by the war the true tragedy that had happened. It’s not that people during WWII didn’t care about the mass genocide that was occurring in these concentration camps, it’s that they had no idea this was even happening. 

Beyond being a story that sequences the career of a brilliant woman, Lee is impactful because it paints Lee Miller as a complicated, strong and contradictory character. From the very first introduction to Lee, she’s combative, defensive and hardened. These characteristics are not to say she lacked kindness, but rather to show how the trauma she had endured had made her skeptical of the world around her.

The film creates a really interesting link between Lee’s own trauma and her desire to get the truth of what happened in WWII out to the public. Lee never told anyone what she endured in her childhood and has always lived with the anger that it’s so common for people to do horrible, life-altering things to others and just get away with it. There was no accountability in what happened to her, so if she has the opportunity to provide a vehicle or evidence to hold the Nazis accountable for their crimes she is going to do everything in her power to do so.  

This stands not as a comparison of pain or saying at all that what happened to Lee is equivalent to the Holocaust’s scale of tragedy, but to show why she is so determined to get her photos out into the world. During the war, Lee was intentional in seeking out the worst of the war to validate its existence. In the film, she desperately wants to present this irrefutable evidence to say to the world “Look, this really happened, this is a horror beyond anyone’s worst imagination and it happened”. 

While Lee has a deep desire to show others the truth, that seems to be the hardest thing for her to face. Lee never works through her trauma. She turns to pills and alcohol and throws herself into work in order to escape having to deal with the rough waters that lie beneath her cool surface. Her son Anthony had no idea what she had done in the war until after she passed and he came across her photographs. Her traumatic childhood made it hard for her to open up and after what she witnessed in the war, it shut her off from sharing her life almost entirely. 

The beauty in Lee’s character is that she did not wish to be known intimately, but desperately sought to understand the world around her. Kate Winslet is a revelation as Lee Miller. She perfectly embodies the spirit and inner struggles of a woman that others couldn’t understand because she refused to be pinpointed as one thing. She lived in a wildly binary world but refused to fit into any type of mold. 

Lee is an incredibly moving character study of a woman who was so deeply misunderstood. Kuras beautifully depicts the humanity Lee was able to see through the fear of war and the ambition that drove her to fight for justice and accountability. This film will have you walking away with a promise to not shrink into the places the world wants you to fit into and a desire to live as boldly as you possibly can. 

Lee was released in UK & Irish cinemas on September 13, 2024 and will be released in US theaters on September 27.