Lee Christian Review
Some movies don’t want to fit into tidy boxes. Lee, a biopic that dances between war drama and a portrait of personal chaos, is one of them. Lee Miller—the woman, not the film—was glamorous and gritty, a restless spirit in a world that often prefers its women predictable and contained. She was a fashion model turned photographer turned war correspondent, someone who straddled the extremes of beauty and brutality. The film, directed by Ellen Kuras, tries to capture the complex duality of Miller’s life, but whether it actually succeeds is a harder question. You might call it a fascinating misfire or a flawed triumph, depending on where you stand.
What Lee does best is lean into its contradictions. It never smooths over Miller’s rough edges or tries to make her entirely likable, and that’s to its credit. But it’s also a movie that feels oddly torn between reverence and restraint, never quite finding its footing. And while that tension makes for a compelling watch, it also makes for a somewhat unsatisfying one.
Elegance Amidst Chaos: Lee Miller’s Story
From a distance, Lee Miller’s life sounds almost too dramatic to be real. Born into privilege, she started her career as a model in the 1920s and quickly became one of the defining faces of her era. But the fashion world couldn’t contain her ambition, and she eventually picked up a camera herself, becoming a surrealist photographer and, later, a photojournalist covering World War II. If the film Lee were only about this transformation—how a woman in pearls and lipstick ended up standing amidst the rubble of bombed-out cities—it would be intriguing enough. But Kuras is aiming for something deeper: a portrait of a woman who was simultaneously drawn to beauty and repelled by it, someone who craved adventure but was haunted by what she saw.
For a Christian viewer, this theme of brokenness and redemption is hard to ignore. Miller’s story is, in many ways, about a woman trying to find meaning in a shattered world. She’s chasing after something—truth, perhaps, or maybe just adrenaline—but the more she sees, the less she seems to find. There’s a moment in the film, set in a ruined cathedral, where Miller stands amidst the debris, her camera hanging limply by her side. It’s one of the quieter scenes, almost meditative in its stillness, and it captures the essence of her dilemma: how do you reconcile beauty and destruction, grace and sin?
A Woman in a Man’s World: War Through Lee’s Eyes
Kuras’s approach to Miller’s war years is one of Lee’s strengths, and also one of its frustrations. The film doesn’t shy away from the horror of what Miller witnessed, nor does it romanticize her role as a correspondent. There’s a grit to these scenes, a sense of reality that you don’t often get in war films, which tend to veer towards either the overly sentimental or the excessively graphic. Here, the violence is simply part of the background, a fact of life that Miller has to navigate. It’s unflinching without being gratuitous, and that restraint is both effective and a little unnerving.
But while the film honors Miller’s courage, it sometimes falls into the trap of reducing her to a symbol. There’s an almost relentless focus on her defiance—how she broke into a male-dominated field, how she pushed back against expectations. That’s all true, of course, and worth celebrating. But Miller wasn’t just a feminist icon avant la lettre; she was a human being with her own messy mix of strengths and flaws. The film’s insistence on framing her as a trailblazer, while inspiring, also feels a bit one-dimensional. It risks flattening her into a symbol of resistance rather than letting her be fully herself.
Beauty and the Brutality: Aesthetic Tension in Lee
Visually, Lee is stunning. Filmed in England, Hungary, and Croatia, the movie’s aesthetic echoes Miller’s own photography—elegant yet unadorned, beautiful but never pretty. There’s a coldness to the color palette, a sense of distance that mirrors Miller’s own emotional detachment. The war scenes, in particular, are shot with a kind of detached precision, emphasizing the surreal beauty of destruction without glorifying it. Alexandre Desplat’s score complements this approach perfectly. It’s subtle, almost minimalist, with an undercurrent of melancholy that never quite resolves. The music doesn’t tell you what to feel; it simply heightens what’s already there.
But this visual elegance also serves to underscore one of the film’s weaknesses. For all its polish, Lee sometimes feels strangely aloof, like a beautiful photograph that you admire without ever really connecting to. There’s a sense that Kuras is holding back, keeping us at a distance from Miller’s inner life. We see what she sees, but we don’t always understand what she feels. The result is a film that’s haunting, yes, but also a little hollow.
A Festival Crowd-Pleaser with Bite: What Lee Gets Right
Despite its flaws, Lee is the kind of movie that’s easy to admire. It’s well-made, well-acted, and clearly crafted with care. The performances are uniformly excellent, particularly from the lead, who captures Miller’s enigmatic mix of strength and vulnerability. There’s a subtlety to the acting that’s rare in biopics, a refusal to oversell the drama. Even the supporting characters—many of whom are real historical figures—feel fully fleshed out, their interactions tinged with the complexities of real relationships.
But if Lee is a good film, it’s not a great one. The pacing is uneven, the narrative sometimes muddled. The first half drags, struggling to find its rhythm, while the second half, though much stronger, can’t quite shake the sense of missed potential. It’s frustrating because there are moments—glimpses, really—when you see what Lee could have been. A scene in a Paris café, a tense confrontation at a military checkpoint, a quiet moment of reflection amidst the chaos of a war zone—these are the moments when Lee truly shines. But they’re too few and far between.
Faith and Identity: Searching for Something More
What makes Lee intriguing from a Christian perspective is its focus on the search for meaning. There’s no overt religious content here, no grand discussions of faith or redemption. But there’s a spiritual restlessness that runs through the film, a sense that Miller is chasing after something she can’t quite name. She’s a woman caught between two worlds—one of beauty, the other of brutality—and she’s trying to make sense of both. For Christians, this tension is familiar. We’re all trying to reconcile the brokenness of the world with the hope of something better, something truer.
But Miller’s story is also a cautionary tale. Her pursuit of truth, while noble, is ultimately a lonely one. She’s searching for something beyond herself, but she never seems to find it. There’s a sadness to her story, a sense of incompleteness. And while the film doesn’t dwell on this, it’s there, lurking beneath the surface. Lee is a reminder that the search for meaning is a journey, not a destination—and that sometimes, the answers we seek aren’t the ones we find.
Final Thoughts: A Good Film That Almost Touches Greatness
In the end, Lee is a good film, but not a great one. It’s the kind of movie that’s worth watching for its strengths, even if its flaws are hard to ignore. It’s beautiful, compelling, and occasionally profound, but it never quite reaches the heights it aims for. Like its subject, Lee is complicated, contradictory, and a little bit haunted. And maybe that’s fitting. After all, Lee Miller wasn’t a perfect heroine—she was just a woman trying to find her place in a world that didn’t always make sense. And sometimes, that’s more than enough.
