Do I have any right to be disappointed that the story of Lee Miller is book ended by her role and failures as a mother?

I am perhaps overthinking it and after all this film is based on the memoir by her son Anthony Penrose. It wasn’t until the closing scenes that I realised that the gawky young man interviewing the famous Lee Miller about her years as a war photographer during the second world war was in fact her son. Deliberately hidden from us I suspect, with good reason because it allows us to focus for 95% of the film on Lee as a bad ass woman who refused to do what was expected of women at the time.

For a while it feels like a primer for those who don’t know her work, and I know that is a bit of a flex but having studied photography, she has always been one of my heroes.  I think I loved her partly because she had gone from muse for surrealist photographer Man Ray to a celebrated photographer in her own right, and those photos she took after the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps have been seared in my mind ever since.

What I didn’t know or I had forgotten was how difficult it was for her as a woman to be allowed on the front line. Working for British Vogue – and there are some wonderful scenes of Cecil Beaton‘s cattiness but I wonder at his legacy being reduced to bitchy one liners – she feels supported in her editorial work but is frustrated by being banned from anything military because of her gender.

She has an epiphany that, as an American, she should just try with US Vogue and this successfully sends her to the front line in the dying months of the war. She is still treated differently though, and at first has to dress as a man just to get to the press briefing but she is eventually sent to where the action is and we see that is it is just as traumatic and horrific as you would expect.

She has a compatriot in Davy Sherman (Andy Samberg) and along with her narration – the device of her explaining things to her son – this gives us some insight into the kind of person she was. At one point she describes herself as someone who likes to drink, have sex and take photographs and although this is simplistic, it says a lot about her gung ho approach to life and refusal to stay quiet and at home.

Husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), artist and father of her son, tries to get her to come home but thankfully for us and for history, she refuses to go.  We build to the scenes we have been waiting for, with her photographing the horrors of the camps. This is handled with a fair amount of sensitivity, we get glimpses that are enough to fill in the blanks.

I didn’t realise she was such a bad ass, but of course I probably could’ve expected it considering she was one of the few or perhaps only female photographers on the front line at the time. I was disappointed that as Winslet’s Lee takes iconic photos, we aren’t shown the actual photos, only the fictional recreations. We do see them over the closing titles but it would have been more authentic, more true to her legacy I think if we had seen them all the way through. 

It seems churlish to complain about the book ending of the film with the emotions of her son. What is significant is that he didn’t know anything about her war photography until after she died and he found boxes of her photos in the attic. I think this says something about how deeply emotionally affected she was by the experience but also perhaps something about her being a woman. I can’t imagine a male photographer hiding away an illustrious career when he chose to have a family.

Kate Winslet is so good as Lee. In fact I completely lost sight of the fact that she was a character and not the real thing. I love her womanly, motherly body being so front and centre. Reading about Lee from her son’s perspective, it’s possible that she was an alcoholic who suffered depression through most of her life and was a very difficult person to live with. We are certainly not shown this facet of Lee, skating more gently over her abrasive self-indulgence or seeing it as a lark. 

I couldn’t help thinking of Civil War as I was watching it, both for the fact that Kirsten Dunst’s character is called Lee Miller and because of the parallels between the dogged exhausting toll of photographing war.

The first thing I did when I left the film was to cross the road into Readings bookshop and find a book of Miller’s photographs. It’s worth seeing the originals.