Lee (Miller) : Movie Review

I watched this film this afternoon. Prior to reading about the production thereof I had never heard of Lee Miller, the model turned photographer, turned war correspondent. Naturally as a photographer I began looking into the work she did and was surprised to find some truly interesting images. So is this movie about her, or about what she did as a photographer? Not as easy a question to answer as you’d think.

In this case I think it’s about the photographer, with a little bit about her work thrown in. It is a beautifully filmed piece with really good cinematography, lighting and the acting, from Kate Winslet at least, is not unbearable. 

However, we don’t learn a great deal about the life that Miller led prior to becoming a WW2 photographer, other than to note that she partook of high society with scant regard to much else prior to the outbreak of the war. If you do any reading about her life you will discover quite a lot of tasty bits, which the film kind of touches on, but not to the degree you might expect if it was going to be a film about her life. It’s very vague and assumes that you know something about her life rather than telling you what she was all about. As I said at the beginning of this review, I had never heard of her before, so I very much doubt that anybody not interested in photography would have any inkling either. This is quite a big gap in context for a modern audience to fill on their own. 

For instance, we don’t get to learn anything about how she moved from being in front of the camera to behind it, or anything about the world of a photographer in that time period, other than her encountering the male chauvinism of that period of history. There is no mention of her relationship with Man Ray at all, which would have been a fairly critical interlude in understanding her life and how she got to where the narrative of this movie begins. We only pick up her life story when she meets her first husband, artist Roland Penrose. We are to presume that she is already an accomplished photographer, but we don’t know how she got there. It’s a pity because if the producers were looking to draw attention to the fact that she was somebody before she went into the conflict zone they missed it entirely by omitting that period of her story. 

One thing that they do include in the movie is how she got the images she eventually became known for. The director takes the time to show her getting her compositions right and at the end of the film we get to see the original outcomes of these situations she recorded at the end of the war. She was certainly talented behind her TLR. 

The most famous of her images, bathing in Hitler's Munich apartment bathtub. 

Towards the end of the movie I began wondering to myself what the purpose of war photography actually is. While I absolutely love photo journalism, I often try to put myself in the same situation that so many war photographers find themselves in. What would I photograph? Would I be concerned about composition or would I be concerned about subject matter? Could I even begin to find a way to balance these two elements? What I do know is that when I see images of the things that humans do to one another in the name of national righteousness I get angry about mankind’s ability to devour his own soul. If war photography is a part of driving the awareness of war revulsion or encouraging the evil men among us to immerse themselves in it, then I suppose it has achieved a purpose of some sort. 

The film about Lee Miller doesn’t touch on the effect that her war experience had on her life afterwards. Alcoholism, familial abandonment, PTSD, she went through it all, but this is not a part of the narrative recounted in this picture. A pity because it could have been a much more interesting movie if they had focused on these effects, or even her journey to becoming a photographer.