Lee review – Kate Winslet is an ex-model on a mission in musty biopic

The Oscar-winner is reliably commanding as Lee Miller, who went from fashion to war photography, but she struggles to lift a by-the-numbers drama

A passion project almost a decade in the making, Lee is the kind of stodgy biopic that feels of a time far before that, a bullet point-ticking list of events gussied up to be an actual movie. The life it’s focused on, that of model turned second world war photographer Lee Miller, is an undeniably interesting one, but it’s only in the briefest of moments that the film justifies why it’s a narrative endeavour rather than a documentary and every one of those moments comes courtesy of its lead.

Attached to the project since it was officially announced back in 2015, Kate Winslet makes for a formidable Miller, lifting the film out of anonymity on her shoulders. It’s not hard to buy her as a woman who boasted the looks and then the resolve to go from magazine shoots to the battlefield, a seductive and steely performance that keeps chugging along even when everything around her is losing steam. The film focuses on Miller’s life as an American in Europe as the world teetered on the verge of the second world war. Her modelling career was over and she’d found herself compelled to a life on the other side of the camera, taking pictures and enjoying debauched getaways getting drunk and discussing art with her bohemian friends (early on she confesses that she’s only good at drinking, sex and taking pictures). As the war begins, her need to feel useful in some way drives her to the frontline as she tries to capture the horrors for Vogue magazine.

Lee is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date to be announced

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3aPS8KU

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