Lee (2024)

Ellen Kuras brings the war photographer Lee Miller to the screen with the solemnity of a museum plaque, and Kate Winslet carries the thing on her back. The film follows Miller from fashion modelling through the Blitz, the Normandy landings, and the liberation of the camps, and it never lets us forget the walls built around her. She is barred from combat zones because she is a woman. Editors condescend. Male financiers, we are told, once asked why anyone should like this woman, and Winslet reportedly paid two weeks of wages herself when the money ran dry. The feminist spine here is genuine and sustained, and it is the film's clearest organising principle.

Elsewhere the ledger runs thin. The cast is a white European ensemble appropriate to a 1940s Vogue circle, with a handful of supporting non-white faces sprinkled through the wartime ranks and no particular comment made about them. The bohemian Parisian milieu hints at a freer personal life, yet the film has no real interest in anything beyond the heterosexual frame. Racial dynamics surface only in the public shaming of women collaborators, a scene observed without much analysis. There is no environmental content, no critique of the fashion economy that employs her, and no engagement with body image despite the modelling backstory. Miller's drinking and post-traumatic stress are handled gently, though as wartime wounds, not as a modern diagnostic category.

As history the film is faithful, dramatising the true story of the censored concentration camp photographs and the attic archive her son later uncovered, with no ideological reworking of the record. Its sermonising is mild. Occasionally it pauses to remind us that women in war and the act of bearing witness matter, then it moves on. The result is a respectable, slightly airless biopic that knows exactly which buttons to press and presses them with a gloved hand. It earns a modest reading on the cultural seismograph. Nothing here will frighten a studio, and nothing here will bore a historian.