Film Pick of the Week: Lee - review by Yvette Huddleston

It is on this latter part of her career in particular that this intense, intelligent film focusses. Directed by cinematographer turned director Ellen Kuras, her feature debut, and starring Kate Winslet, outstanding in the lead role, it is a fine tribute to a remarkable, pioneering figure. The film employs a neat narrative device – with Miller being interviewed in the 1970s towards the end of her life by a young man who we assume is a journalist or researcher (played by Josh O’Connor) – which enables her wartime experiences to be recounted in flashback.

The story begins immediately before the outbreak of war and incorporates a nice grown-up romance as Miller meets and falls in love with the English artist, poet and critic Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard). Moving to London to be with Penrose, she finds work at Vogue under the whip smart, forward-thinking editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), photographing the harsh realities of life on the Home Front in the wartime capital.

But Miller feels she wants to do more, to report on what is happening in war-torn Europe. She heads for the frontline, and despite the fact that the US army doesn’t allow women into combat areas, she finds a way to record some of the most significant and disturbing events of the conflict. She teams up with young Life photographer David E Scherman (Andy Samberg) and together they travel to the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, among the first civilians to bear witness to the atrocities that took place there.

The film recreates many of Miller’s most iconic images including her infamous 1945 self-portrait sitting in Hitler’s bathtub, taken when she and Sherman gained entry to the Führer’s abandoned Munich apartment. The war was a pivotal time in Miller’s life and for much of the rest of it she would suffer from depression and alcohol addiction, what we would now recognise as symptoms of PTSD.