First a fashion model, then an artist, then a professional photographer and war correspondent, Lee Miller defied the order that surrounded her. Though she is probably most famous for directing David Scherman’s famous photo of her nude in Eva Braun’s bathtub, I prefer this no nonsense profile he took of her somewhere in Allied occupied Europe. With her custom visor, she looks like a knight, determined to win in any fight. I first came across her photographs in graduate school. Her plutonic partner Scherman, an American Jew, was rumored to have taken a shit in Hitler’s toilet - an oft visited place for G.I.’s in occupied Munich. With Gitta Sereny, Hannah Arendt, and Sophie Scholl, Miller defined the way we look at the War.
First Screening. AMC. Tightwad Tuesday. There were about ten people in the theatre so I hope this does well. As we get further and further away from the War, it terrifies me that there will be a loss of memory about that event and what it means for our collective human history. My son is studying in Germany right now, and this weekend took a train to Prague. And on his way, he passed through Dresden, which had a train yard so massively important to the Third Reich that the British Air Force wiped the entire city and it's 120,000 inhabitants off the face of the earth. I'm sure there are people that live in downtown Hiroshima that are not too sure what happened there. This is my fear.
And then I hear on the We Have Ways Podcast that in the month of September, the 80th Anniversary of Market Garden, 100,000 people went to The Netherlands to celebrate and Allied defeat. Think about that. A defeat. Market Garden was like the Alamo of the Second World War, and more than 90% of the people who were there weren't alive during the war. But they went. And they celebrated the ATTEMPT to push the Nazis out of a country they had no right to be in. Last June, a quarter million people went to Normandy to celebrate D-Day. And now, there's Lee, which is a lot of film to think about. And films like Lee give me hope that we're not ready to forget yet. We're still trying to process all the pain and trauma of that horrible F word and everything it did to us. And everything it's doing now (the first day of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, a targeted missile descendant of a War era V-2 landed on top of the monument that memorialized the massacre of 60,000 Jews at Babi Yar- just to name one example).
Lee is a spectacular film for its continuity (an inheritance of Spielberg's war-era saturation techniques) and for its original story. I was in grad school when a teacher of mine passed around original magazines of the war, including LOOK, TIME, and one of them was VOGUE, which we all laughed at until we opened it and saw Lee Miller's photograph of a room stacked full of corpses. Breathtaking. It induced one of us to tears. This is 65 plus years later. We've seen the footage. We know what happened, and still her photographs were punching through. I heard this film was coming out about six months ago, and a couple of weeks ago, Lee's son was on a podcast talking about his mom and how he reconstructed her life after she died in 1977. Rough stuff. Finding out your mom was a supermodel in the 1920's had to be something to adjust to. Finding out your mom asked G.I.'s to open train doors so she could photography carloads full of dead undesirables is something else. And I'm not talking about death camps. I'm just talking about one of thousands of concentration camps where people were just outright starved to death. It's hard enough for me to think if my Grandfather was too slow, the bullet might not have gone through his ankle and instead have gone through his thigh and severed his femoral. He could have bled out, changing my father's life in not having a father of his own. My standard of living, my personality shaped by knowing my grandfather, forever changed. That's what Antony Penrose, Lee's son, thinks about every time he thinks of his mom.
And as that as a background, I have to say this film is a great extrapolation of those experiences and Lee's fight to do everything she wanted to do. Her fight to define herself instead of other defining that for her. Winslet had several moments in the film that others might see as dramatic or over the top, but I thought was shockingly good. She's always been amazing, despite most of her projects not particularly interesting to me. Her portrayal of taking pictures at Buchanwald's crematoria with Andy Samberg was a stunning display. The director NEVER showed you what she was looking at. You didn't have to see it. You had only Winslet's face to convey to you what she was seeing. And it was horrible.
Samberg's portrayal as David Scherman, Lee's plutonic and unofficial partner during the war, was an amazing break from what I've seen him in the past (and I'm one of those people that think Palm Springs is AMAZING). On one level it seems uneventful. Samberg is a Jew playing a Jew. But Samberg's understated professionalism, when gauged right alongside Lee's, shows you how professional Lee was. This gender equating is subtle story arch material and not a bat over your head message material. There was no message here. There was only Lee. My only criticism being that in 1944 Lee was 37 years old and still looking like the model she was in 1930. Ms. Winslet is 50 and this age discrepancy is the same issue Kevin Spacey had in Beyond the Sea when he played Bobby Darin 15 years older Darin when he died. There were also time period inconsistencies that I won't go into because frankly they are childish compared to the important story of Lee's life. In a universe of no Lee films, I'll take a flawed one, and I'm sure no one would be disappointed in having a pro like Winslet play them.