Kate Winslet has been nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Actress, including a win for her 2008 performance in the anti-Nazi film The Reader. Now Winslet is back with another gut-wrenching anti-fascist film, Lee, a biopic about real-life photographer Lee Miller.
During the 1930s, Poughkeepsie-born Miller was a model, a Bohemian expat who roamed around the French Riviera, a part of Europe’s surrealist arts scene, and a fashion photographer for British Vogue magazine. World War II gave Miller the opportunity to document history as she evolved into a photojournalist covering the crusade against fascism, starting with the Blitz and Battle of Britain.
Despite restrictions placed on female combat correspondents that forbade them from going to combat zones, from Normandy to Paris and from Berlin to Buchenwald, Miller went on to boldly—even recklessly—approach the frontlines to shoot the war against Nazism with her unflinching, unerring eye. Lee teamed up and traveled with fellow photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg), a Jewish correspondent shooting for Life magazine.
Scherman snapped the famous photo of the former model literally taking a bath in Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun’s bathtub at their former Munich apartment, now occupied by triumphant Allied soldiers.
But Lee’s best work came after the liberation of Paris, when she encounters some of her old friends, including Duchess Solange d’Ayen, the fashion editor of Vogue France (played by Marion Cotillard, who won the Best Actress Oscar for portraying chanteuse Édith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie En Rose). Miller asks her friends where their other French companions are. After she keeps getting the same answer—that Jews, communists, Roma, gays, and others disappeared on trains, and nobody knows where they went—Miller and Scherman set out in a Jeep together, determined to solve the mystery.
The intrepid combat photographers’ odyssey takes them into the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Miller proceeds to chronicle Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (and other “undesirables” on an industrial scale) using her Rolleiflex camera. With this graphic record, an oeuvre revealing the Holocaust’s horrors, Miller’s work gains transcendent meaning, railing against man’s inhumanity to man. The film explicitly shows us what 2023’s Oscar-winning Zone of Interest—another World War II-era biopic, about Auschwitz’s commandant and his family—did not, such as specific scenes of myriad corpses and the assembly line means of their genocidal slaughter in showers where they were gassed and ovens where victims were burned. However, Lee doesn’t dwell on images of mass murder, and what happens to the images Miller painstakingly captures opens a thought-provoking meditation on mass media censorship.
As for the movie itself, at first glance it seems like a conventionally structured Hollywood biopic. Early in Lee, a young man appearing to be a journalist interviews an older Miller, who’d returned to live in England after the war. Lee periodically cuts back and forth from this question-and-answer session to the unfolding of her life story. The film, however, takes a sharp left turn. This surprising plot device, which I won’t spoil for you, upends the notion that this is a conventionally told story.
Although this is not the first feature in recent years wherein the protagonist is a woman war correspondent (see 2018's A Private War and 2024's Civil War), Lee is the only one of these movies directed by a woman. The film is cinematographer Ellen Kuras’s feature directorial debut; she previously directed 2008’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Betrayal, a story about Laotians forced to emigrate to America due to the secret bombing of Laos by the United States during the Indochina War, and an episode of Hulu’s Catch-22 TV mini-series.
Kuras elicits moving performances from her cast, which includes Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård (known for the 2008-2014 HBO vampire series True Blood, and 2022's The Northman) as Miller’s husband and surrealist artist Roland Penrose, and English actress Andrea Riseborough (2014’s Birdman) as British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, who battles censorship. Normally known as an SNL funnyman, Andy Samberg delivers a serious, dramatic performance as David Scherman.
This reviewer wagers that Winslet will earn another well-deserved Oscar nomination for her role as Lee Miller, a complicated, courageous, creative woman who used her talents to fight the good fight. As the MAGA movement’s menace looms and far-right Brits riot against migrants, Muslims, and refugees, thoughtful, powerful films like Lee remind audiences what fascism is and why it must always be resisted
Lee will be released in 750 theaters nationwide on September 27.