"LEE" MOVIE REVIEW

Work today involved taking in the new movie “Lee” with fellow screenwriter and good friend Alex Waugh.

Executive summary: Best movie I have seen all year and in top five of the past 3 years. If the movie isn’t nominated for Best Picture and Kate Winslet doesn’t win Best Actress, there is no justice.

This biopic is about Lee Miller, who took Paris as a teenaged model in the 20s, became Man Ray’s “muse” at 18, went on to become part of the Surrealist Movement, and a top fashion photographer before the war, who went on to become one of the five best combat photographers of World War II - often compared with Robert Capa. Se was famed for her photos of frontline medical staff treating the wounded (an assignment forced on her when she wasn’t allowed to go to the front for “being female”), the Liberation of Paris, and the first photos of Dachau published in America, by American “Vogue” in June 1945 under the title “Believe It,” and a self portrait of herself bathing in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich apartment. The trauma of her wartime experienced nearly destroyed her.

After a terrifying opening sequence of her introduction to combat in one of the most realistically scarifying battle sequences I’ve seen on film, we catch up with her in the late 1930s, she’s gallivanting around the south of France with her friends, the group blithely unaware of the horrors that await with the rise of Adolf Hitler - as she says: “I was drinking, fucking and taking pictures - and doing all three as often as possible.”

One of the animating questions in a film about a war correspondent is “Why?” Why do they do what they do? Why do they keep pushing, searching, exposing themselves to the suffering of war? Kte Winslet is more than capable of stepping into that kind of intense role.

The excellent female readers of That’s Another Fine Mess will find in Lee Miller a person all of you would have liked to be a friend of.

Winslet produced “Lee” in addition to starring in it and spent nine years developing the project, working with Antony Penrose, Miller’s son and the author of the book “The Lives of Lee Miller,” which was adapted by screenwriters Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee. Thi picky screenwriter really liked the way the story was done. While the script is crafted in a traditional biopic format, it has an unexpected twist at the end that tells of Penrose’s experience writing about his mother’s life, trying to make sense of it.

Ellen Kuras, who was cinematographer of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which starred Winslet, directs with real bravura - again, if there’s any Hollywood justice, she will land a nomination for Best Director with this, her narrative feature directing debut. This is a movie that needed women in charge, since its subject is the female gaze in wartime. Lee Miller seeks out the women in war, not just because she’s often shut out of male spaces, but because she is compelled to; it becomes her artistic and journalistic obsession.

Though Miller is often spoken about in the context of her famous affairs, much of “Lee” is devoted to her working relationships and close friendships. Marion Cotillard and Noemi Merlant, play Lee’s French confidantes; Andrea Riseborough co-stars as Audrey Withers, Lee’s editor and champion at Vogue; Andy Samberg, who is a knockout in his first purely dramatic role, plays Davy Scherman, photographer for Life Magazine, who becomes Lee’s professional partner as they report the war in France and Germany. His moment as a Jew confronting the Holocaust directly at Dachau is quietly devastating. Winslet’s Lee, a force of nature, has her own fears and vulnerabilities, and she finds comfort in Davy, a rare man who feels safe enough to trust. During the liberation of France in 1944, she hears of missing people and they drive deep into Germany at the very end of the war to uncover the ugly reality of the Holocaust, relentlessly pushing forward in search of the truth.

“Lee” is anchored by a stunning extended sequence as Lee and Davy document the wreckage and human destruction of Hitler’s regime: Nazi suicide pacts, piles of corpses, concentration camps, prisoners and victims. It slowly builds to the capturing the iconic photo of Lee bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, one of the most famous images of her. After witnessing the human toll of Hitler’s murderous wake, it seems apt to humiliate or dominate him in this specifically feminine way. In the film, Lee is both the model and the author of this image and creating it is cathartic, leading to an emotional breakdown for Davy, delicately conveyed by Samberg. The flinty Lee remains stoic, speaking through her work, drowning her emotions in booze and pills.

Kate Winslet is one of those actors I will see whatever she’s in. She’s tremendous as always, embodying Lee’s gruff, no-nonsense persona, a hardened exterior underneath which a great wound still bleeds.

This is a penetrating biopic, and while it may take a familiar shape, the pioneering woman at the center was anything but traditional.

I loved it. Everything is right, even to using the correct airplanes in the background in two sequences - a small but telling point.

It’s in limited theatrical release, so if you can’t see it in a theater now, put it on your list of movies to watch when it shows up next Spring on cable.

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