‘Lee’ Review: Kate Winslet Excels In A Complex Biopic Of A Woman At War On Many Fronts – Toronto Film Festival
17.09.2023 - 01:35
/ deadline.com
A new trend on the fall festival circuit this year is the biopic of the unknown hero, something that seems unthinkable now in the digital age. There’s One Life, about the Schindler-like achievements of Nicholas Winton, who saved nearly 700 Jewish children from certain death in German-occupied Prague. There’s Rustin, about the gay, Black activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — literally, right down to the toilet facilities — and had to wait 50 years for an official thank-you.
And there’s also Lee, which is slightly different from these previous two films in that its subject — photographer and former model Lee Miller — is pretty well known in all the fields she’s associated with, mostly in the world of art. But Ellen Kuras’s film is a thoughtful attempt to step back from what Miller actually did and to focus on the way she actually did it, usually with little encouragement and hardly any gratitude.
Refreshingly, although it is a kind of Hidden Figures-style exposé of the way women’s stories are erased from history, it isn’t simply a call-out of systemic sexism, it’s a bigger, more inclusive story about art and the purpose of art, about the point where creativity and reportage overlap: a frontline Miller crossed (figuratively and literally) many times during the Second World War.
After a tense wartime prologue — Miller in camo, running from gunfire — the framing device is disappointingly prosaic in terms of what we’re about to see: Miller (played convincingly by Kate Winslet in every timeframe) is being interviewed by a man (Josh O’Connor) who we presume to be a journalist. He wants to hear her story, and she says there isn’t one. He has her photographs in front of him, some of the most
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