‘I’m going to the front. Are you coming?‘
The problem with making another film about WWII is finding something new to say – something fresh to bring to the table. Noted cinematographer Ellen Kuras presents us with an untold story from that era in the shape of a biopic about pioneering war photographer Lee Miller and while the individual story is compelling, there is nothing here that we haven’t already seen before…
Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) led an unconventional life starting out as a model but then going behind the camera to become a photographer. She worked for Dame Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) at Vogue UK and hung out with poets and artists, but her work always came first. Andy Samberg and Alexander Skarsgård round out a starry cast.
As is to be expected, Winslet is phenomenal as the eponymous subject matter. She takes some of the world-weary, takes-no-shit, attitude that she brought to the character of Mare Sheehan in Mare of Eastown but her Lee Miller also has an undercurrent of pain coupled with a fierce determination to change the world. It’s a bravado performance that is all but certain to be recognised by the Academy at next year’s Oscars. The problem is that the film going on around her is a fairly conventional biopic. The reluctant and cranky interviewee recounting their life story to an eager journalist has been done to death and that’s just one example of how Lee struggles to break out of the genre trappings that come with a biopic. Some of the most affecting scenes here (the discovery of the Nazi death camps, exploring Hitler’s military base) were already cemented in pop culture history by Band of Brothers over 20 years ago. These scenes offer nothing new in terms of insight here.
Lee, like so many biopics, is a showcase for its cast and features an incredible performance at its heart, but it’s also too safe and too familiar to really stand out in what is a crowded field.
