Ellen Kuras's biopic of Lee Miller has been a long-in-gestation passion project for its tenacious producer-star Kate Winslet. The passion hasn't quite made it to the screen, though. Instead, Lee emerges as a work(wo)manlike biopic that too often defaults to the traditional tropes of the genre. These include a flashback structure featuring Winslet tetchily reminiscing in old age make-up, and reductive broad-brush caricaturing of some of the famous figures who crossed Miller's path. With a spelling-it-out script by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume that doesn't trust the audience to know the basics about the Blitz or that Jews were not the only group to face Nazi persecution, the film sometimes skirts Shining Through (1992)-style silliness. But with expectations suitably lowered it's a fairly entertaining piece of work.
It's not hard to see what drew Winslet to Lee as a subject. Miller's life trajectory - from model and Modernist muse to a dedicated war correspondent whose photos from the frontlines and concentration camps, published in Vogue, revealed the horrors of WWII to the wider international public - is a unique one, to say the least. (The full range of her photographic work was only discovered after her death in 1977, when it was published by her son.)
Unsurprisingly, Lee is quite single-minded in celebrating Miller's pluck and daring. We pick up her story from the late 1930s (that is, post-Man Ray) when she's hanging out in France with a diverse group (including Marion Cotillard as Solange d'Ayen, noblewoman and French Vogue fashion editor). Lee's bohemianism is immediately signposted when Winslet whips off her top to go bare-breasted during an al fresco lunch, and Kuras can't resist making her a proto-#MeToo heroine with equal obviousness, whether she's intervening to prevent a rape or revealing her own horrendous experience of sexual assault in a late monologue.
But if the script struggles to get to grips with Miller's complexities, contradictions or artistic development, Winslet - smoking harder even than Jane Fonda did in Julia (1977) - is compelling throughout, and at least succeeds in making Lee's impulsiveness and drive palpable.
Most of the supporting cast get fewer opportunities to shine, from Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose, Miller's second husband, to Angela Riseborough taking the clipped diction to Harriet Walter levels as sympathetic British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, or Samuel Barnett as Cecil Beaton in a weak caricature of a cameo. Josh O'Connor, invariably an asset, brings some hints of his special soulfulness to the 1970s scenes, but the performance is slightly hampered by the film's insistence on pointlessly obscuring the identity of his character, long after the audience has twigged.
Though less adept at shaping these performances, Kuras, an acclaimed cinematographer making her directorial debut here, brings some distinctive visual life to Lee as it moves through time periods and locations; the film is shot with polish by Pawel Edelman. Miller's most problematic iconic moment - taking a bath in Hitler's tub - is faithfully recreated, and the centrepiece concentration camp sequence, with the colour drained to practically monochrome, has some of the power of the Ukraine scenes in Agnieszka Holland's Mr Jones (2019) which employed a similar technique. A biopic-by-numbers that too often resorts to unsubtle shorthand, Lee doesn't succeed in doing justice to its fascinating protagonist, but as a competent primer it's worthy of your time.
Lee is out in UK cinemas on 13 September.
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