“Forget the mists and mellow fruitfulness,” said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. “Autumn at the cinema is the season of ripening biopics with designs on the Oscars” – and this year, “Lee” is first to be plucked.
Starring Kate Winslet, it is a “handsomely upholstered account” of the life of Lee Miller, the American model-turned-war photographer who accompanied US forces as they advanced through northwest France and into Germany in 1944-45.
Painting events in ‘the clunkiest of manners’
Winslet has been fighting to get this film made for nine years, and she is ideally cast; it’s just a pity that her co-stars (Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg) are given much less to work with, and that the film doesn’t do more to interrogate who Miller really was, or the nature of her work.
I was sorely disappointed, said Alexandra Shulman in the Daily Mail. Winslet plays Miller as “a ball-breaking, badass woman, taking on all comers with a gruff quip and a flick of a cigarette”; whereas Miller was, in my view, far more “inscrutable and enigmatic” – an “icy sphinx who had been raped at the age of seven by a family friend”, and who went into modelling after posing nude for her photographer father.
This film fails to capture her “essence”, and paints events in “the clunkiest of manners, avoiding any of the style and nuance that made Miller exceptional”.
An infuriating ‘and then’ film
It’s also one of those infuriating “and then” films, said Kevin Maher in The Times – as in, “and then” Miller moved to France; “and then” she pivoted to photography; “and then” she photographed the liberation of Dachau.
Meanwhile, poor Skarsgård, playing her upper-class English husband, is “humiliated” by his attempt at an English accent; he sounds “less Noël Coward, more Dutch football commentator”.