Lee review: "Kate Winslet is wonderful but this wartime biopic needs less pathos and more punch"

"I’d rather take a picture than be one," barks US model-turned-photojournalist Lee Miller (a deliciously brusque Kate Winslet), reluctantly revealing the extraordinary stories behind her famous World War 2 photos. 

Exploring how a one-time surrealist art muse fought to report atrocities, this handsome but rather conventional biopic showcases a tip-top Winslet performance, but at times meanders like a weighty Wikipedia entry.

Veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ first feature-directing gig (following episodes of Ozark and The Umbrella Academy) drifts lyrically through Miller’s bohemian poets-and-Pernod pre-war French era ("I was good at sex, drinking, and taking pictures") and a photogenic if lifeless affair with Alexander Skarsgård’s (wobbly-accented) Brit Roland Penrose. 

But it leaps to life once Miller finds her wartime photographic passion, snapping Blitz firefighters for Vogue then haring across newly liberated France and Germany with the US Army, doggedly recording the horrors she finds while Alexandre Desplat’s lush score hints at her despair.

Kudos to Kuras for not sandpapering Miller’s defiant determination, which pushes her through (surprisingly realistic) heavy shelling in Saint-Malo, and into the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps to document the monstrous atrocities witnessed there. Constantly defying army bans on women reporters, Winslet’s Miller is a reckless, hard-drinking obsessive whose, piercing, prickly unlikeability recalls the tough-and-tender Mare of Easttown. 

However, in contrast, Miller’s friends and lovers (including Andy Samberg as besotted fellow snapper David Scherman) tend to come off as one-note characters. The woman who cheekily photographed herself washing in Hitler’s bathtub deserves a wilder, bolder biopic than this glossy but slightly stodgy effort.

Lee is released in UK cinemas on September 13 and in US theaters on September 27. 

For more, check out our guide to upcoming movies.