Lee is a superficial awards-baiting WW2 film that totally fails to resonate in 2024

Lee, a biopic about model turned photographer Lee Miller, feels like the byproduct of a previous era. A glossy WW2 film co-presented by Vogue magazine, the film is structured as a recollection shortly before Lee Miller’s death. While her work as a wartime photographer was mostly forgotten, a “journalist” attempts to gain insight into her otherwise forgotten experience. Weathered and drunken, she resists but eventually gives in, revisiting some of the darkest chapters of the 20th century as seen through her lens.

What works about Lee is the superficials: costuming, beautiful actors and impressive old-age makeup and effects. The film has some good period detail and feels fairly immersive in terms of capturing period detail. Kate Winslet does a decent job as the brash American beauty, while the supporting cast that includes Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant are all shades of good and great. It’s a movie that only slightly tweaks a familiar story in new ways, offering the perspective of a rare woman journalist and an overall attempt to root the film’s struggle in the experience of women.

As the second film this year centred on a woman photojournalist embroiled in war, after Alex Garland’s Civil War, it falls for some of the same traps of that previous film, though offering even less insight on the value (or lack thereof) of photojournalism. With its period setting, in particular, we sense that the film’s context gives permission for the screenwriter and director not to inquire on the very nature of their subject. It’s a movie of the past, for the past, that has no real insight on how a story like this might resonate in 2024. There’s nothing about this film that feels connected to the current moment, contributing to a sense of “been there and done that” and the overall impression that the entire project is little more than awards bait.

Though the film, which initially premiered at TIFF in 2023, predates the ongoing conflict in Palestine, it’s difficult to watch without thinking of how those images of violence, war and genocide relate to those in the film. The painstaking sacrifices that Lee Miller took to document the truth about France under the occupation and, later, the liberation of the death camps, feels unserious in an era where the average person is inundated with images of carnage (and, also, artifice). Death no longer has the ability to shock, and even if it did, the overwhelming pollution of AI images render truth itself relative and unreliable. The very fact that the film reinterprets some of Lee Miller’s photos with careful editing to incorporate the film’s actors feels even more embarrassing in this context; not even the film can commit to photography as an agent of truth.

The way the film deals with the Holocaust ultimately feels devoid of real context. It’s presented as a singular and unfathomable event that was tied to a specific time and place. The movie lacks rigour and engagement; it’s little more than a parade of beautiful people, carefully uglied for maximum dramatic effect. The whole experience cheapens rather than embodies its historical engagement.

Movies like Lee are increasingly difficult to defend or enjoy passively. Who are they for and what do they want to teach us? The experience ultimately feels hollow and pointless, a parade of misery dressed up as an opportunity to champion individual accomplishments. It ignores the big questions and considerations in favour of an easily digested narrative without any real rhyme or reason. And, even within its already narrow perspective, the movie can’t commit to its exploration of femininity and identity, reducing (in its clumsy framing devices) her whole being to an embarrassingly shallow understanding of womanhood. ■

Lee (directed by Ellen Kuras)

Lee opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Sept. 27.

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