With Her Passion Project, Kate Winslet Puts It All On The Line For Another Trip To The Oscars:
Miller was a photographer for Vogue based in London within the 1940s. He wanted to journey to the front lines of World War II alongside the Allies so he could show people what war was really like.
But the truth was much worse than she thought, as well as Miller ended up taking pictures of heartbreaking moments of pain as well as survival, including a few of the initial shocking pictures of the Dachau death camp.
Along with an opening battle scene reminiscent of “Saving Private Ryan,” “Lee” is a glossy character study that premiered at the Roy Thomson Hall Theatre at TIFF upon Saturday night and is now looking for a home in the buyout market.
It’s an emotional movie that puts the audience right in the middle of a war, and Academy Award winner Winslet gives another passionate and bombastic performance.
Winslet Plays The Part Of Miller, And She Also Helped Make The Movie:
Within the glitzy world of Hollywood, where stars come and go like shooting stars, Winslet has gone beyond her fame and shown that she has a lot of depth and variety.
Winslet, who additionally co-produced the movie, plays Miller as the free-spirited American she was while living in Europe. The movie starts with Miller and her painter as well as artist friends having a naked lunch within the south of France within the late 1930s.
As war clouds gather and get darker, she moves to London. Alexander Skarsgaard plays both her boyfriend and her husband, who leaves to do his job. Miller doesn’t want babies or to be safe. Instead, she hopes to be a part of how important this moment is.
Miller, who used to be a model, was able to get Vogue to publish her photos. But she realizes more and more that fascism is dangerous. They go to France with Dave Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, to be on the cutting edge of history.
When Winslet Got A Table That Miller Had Used, It Gave Her The Idea For The Movie:
Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, in addition to the film’s director, Ellen Kuras, and producer, Kate Solomon, said at the opening that the idea for the movie came about when Winslet purchased a table that Miller had used.
“Why hasn’t there ever been a movie about her before?” Winslet asked, according to director Kuras. She started working on making it happen. “When she first started, her research was very immersive,” said Penrose.
“She would go to the library to read and not say much. And then ask some really deep questions. It was like this for weeks. But I got it when I saw her upon set.”
He went on, “Their attitudes are a lot alike: they are both very kind and very curious. Both risky. Both are very attractive and very smart.”
Review Of A Film:
In the first scene, Miller, who is wearing a helmet as well as army fatigues, is running via a street to get away from gunshots until she falls against a wall of sandbags. But that’s just a taste of what’s coming.
From there, we go to 1977, where Miller is 70 and a young man is interviewing her at her home in Sussex, Farley Farmhouse. She smokes a lot and drinks within the middle of the day. She also throws questions back at the reporter, who is not named.
At the end of the movie, there’s a beautiful answer to the question of what this interview was about, but until then, it’s just a creaky way for Winslet to add a voiceover from time to time to move the story along.
The plot is too ordinary to match how unusual Miller is, and the movie doesn’t get really interesting until the main character goes to war. Before that, she resided in the south of France in 1938.
Lee Is Set Up By A Conversation Between A Young Reporter And An Older Lee In 1977:
The older Miller says, “I’d been the model, the muse, and the ingenue.” “I had enough of that. Still, she stays with her famous friends, like Solange, and we get an overview of her free-spirited existence alongside artists as well as writers.
There, she finds Roland Penrose, a painter as well as art collector. They start dating right away, which is a big jump ahead of the story. Lee is set around a conversation between a young reporter and an older Lee in 1977.
This isn’t the only time Kuras obviously ages one of her actresses, but Winslet’s fake-looking makeup is less of an issue than the corniness of this plot device, in which Lee says that all interviews are interrogations and O’Connor’s questioner states that he is simply attempting to understand Lee.
Lee does what she can to tell her story, starting in 1938 within France, when she’s already moving on from being a model and is very interested in photography. She does this in a straight-forward way that borders on being harsh.
When She Is Hired As A Journalist Through The U.S. Military, The Film Really Shows How Important Her Work Is:
At a party with her artistic friends, where she walks topless to show how confident she is, she meets Roland Penrose and falls in love with him. She then moves to England alongside him.
By 1940, Lee is pushing the editor of Vogue, Audrey Withers, and her right-hand man, Cecil Beaton, to hire her. They finally do, but the London Blitz turns everything upside down.
With a camera always hanging around her neck, Lee starts taking pictures of the chaos in the city and teams up with David E. Scherman, who will become her reliable right-hand man.
When the US military recognizes her as a writer, the movie really shows how important her work is and how much it hurts her emotionally and mentally. She goes to Normandy as well as faces fire in St. Malo, France, during a fight.
Davey Joins Her As They Travel Through Europe To Report On The War:
She is covering the war in Europe with Davey. We hear the older Miller say, “We drove for months as well as didn’t wash for weeks,” as we see them in a jeep moving through dirty streets.
After Paris is freed, she makes her way through crumbling buildings to see Solange. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the movie, she learns how terrible the war was for those who lived through it.
Winslet shows us the toll that knowledge puts on Miller as she is forced to look at and record the most painful scenes. When the war is over, she and Davey go to Dachau in Germany.
We don’t see what Miller is when she goes into one room, but the reporter has a picture of piles of dead bodies that Miller took that day.
The War Scenes Are Powerful Enough On Their Own, So There’s No Reason To Add More:
Kuras changes all of this in a way that takes us easily into Miller’s life as well as unique point of view, yet he does so in a way that is very understated. There’s no need to make the war scenes more emotional than they already are.
The music by Alexandre Desplat fits this style with its quiet, striking beauty. If the initial portion of Lee hadn’t been as great as the second, it could have been an outstanding film instead of just a very good one.
She wrote about how hard it was for her to get into Hungary within 1945 because Russian guards were pointing guns at her. She said, “The adventures were wonderful movies.” At the end of the day, they were.
