Review Lee, an uneven movie with Kate Winslet

Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller (Kate Winslet) is a model for Vogue America: during World War II, she is a war correspondent for the magazine, headed by Elizabeth Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough). Here, she portrays war scenes that are only hinted at in the movie directed by Ellen Kuras. In fact, the revolutionary spirit that animated the reporter does not emerge. 

Lee is relegated for a quarter of the movie to her romantic relationship with the painter and historian Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), who becomes her husband. A choice that does not validate the tenacity for which she is remembered in the history of photography. She meets Pablo Picasso (Enrique Arce), Max Ernst, the poet Paul Eluard (Vincent Colombe), Georges Braque, the journalist Solange d'Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and Joan Miró. War scenes are also central, appearing except at the beginning. The difficulty of overcoming the hagiography peddled by classic TV biopics is hardly overcome. 

It is Kate Winslet's effortlessness that gives the character credibility beyond her work. Rather than Lee's extraordinary life, it is her ordinary life that is portrayed: and the narrative intent to show how far she went in the trenches runs up against the limitations of documentary filmmaking. Even the choice to show the son (Josh O'Connor) trying to recount the exploits of his now elderly mother, to whom she reluctantly tells her story, seems to have been seen before and does not add any depth to the protagonist's life.

An unspeakable moment told in the movie Lee

In fact, director Ellen Kuras - who also directed episodes of the TV series Inventing Anna and The Umbrella Academy - is at her most comfortable in the second part of the film, when Lee travels to the Dachau concentration camp at the end of the war. Lee covers his mouth with his hand to avoid the stench of corpses. In one room, with reverent awe, he snaps an unframed shot of a little girl huddled against the wall. In another, he photographed skeletal corpses huddled against a corner with horror. It is these images he cannot escape, and they mark his future life. This is probably where the movie should have started, because from this point on, Lee succeeds in telling the unspeakable with images that shock the world.  

A must see movie for the way it deals, albeit discontinuously, with the relationship between the gaze and death, in relation to one of the most terrible moments in human history. The film will be released in the United States on September 27, 2024, while it does not yet have a release date in Italy.

© All right Reserved