Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
Lee – Prime Video
Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) enjoyed her life as a model, but left it behind for what she said she did best – drinking, having sex and taking pictures saying that life was meant to be lived and have fun. In 1938 Lee was in Mougins, France and spent her days at a french villa with a group of friends where she met Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) and started a romantic relationship. Roland invited her to return to England with him which she opted for instead of returning to Paris with her friends.
In 1940, Lee was living in London with Roland, and though the war was going on in Europe she felt far away from it. Roland was an artist and conscientious objector and was hired to develop camouflage techniques for the war effort. Lee went to Vogue’s London office and asked Audrey Withers for a job as a photographer, but was initially told there was nothing available. This frustrated Lee as she felt it her part in serving the war effort, but shortly after did get the job.
Roland shared with Lee that he had heard that their friends in Paris were going into hiding due to the Nazi occupation, with several of the even joining the resistance, though Lee didn’t know that at the time. Shortly after, the Blitz began in London and the Vogue office was bombed, but sustained minimal damage. Audrey was even more committed to using Vogue as the platform to encourage women to do their part sot support the war effort.
The men were sent to fight in the war, leaving Audrey and Lee to publish Vogue issues with content that best suited them. Months went by as bombs rained down continuously, but Lee went on capturing the war from a woman’s point of view. She caught the eye of Life Magazine photojournalist and war correspondent David Scherman (Andy Samberg), who sought her out and they immediately teamed up together. Lee wanted to highlight women serving near the front lines.
Lee wanted to go to the front lines and realized she would never get authorization from England, but she was American so requested to be a U.S. War correspondent, which she was gladly granted. It was 1944 and Lee was sent to Normandy, France where she was immediately told that women weren’t allowed in press briefing so she dressed as a man and attended the meeting but was caught. Though she was told women could not be in combat, she was eventually sent to the front lines where she met up with David. Lee photographed many autocracies of war in Europe and when Paris was liberated in 1944 she was able to find several of her friends who survived.
In 1945, Lee went with David to the German Border to try to solve the mystery of where thousands of people had disappeared after being taken away on trains. They traveled several months and hundreds of miles throughout Germany and began to witness the true horrors of war saying “once you’ve scene it, you can never unsee it.“ It was during this time that she took her iconic photo of herself posing defiantly in Hitler’s private bathtub.
Unfortunately, Vogue decided the images were too graphic and didn’t print them but wanted to preserve them for history and sent them to New York hoping the American Vogue would print them, which they did in 1945. Today Lee Miller is regarded as one of the greatest war correspondents of our time. Her photographs of the concentration camps remain among the most significant images ever captured of the Holocaust. Winslet thoroughly embodies the essence of Miller in this intimate portrayal and Samberg is stellar in one of his rare non-comedic roles.
Runtime: 1h 57m
