Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Earlier this year, cinemagoers thrilled to Civil War. A splashy blockbuster about US social collapse, the film involved a war photographer: Lee, a blonde American, bone-weary but in the thick of it. She was played by Kirsten Dunst, with character and actor the saving graces of an otherwise empty movie. Now, we get the real thing. Lee, starring Kate Winslet, is the biopic of Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, the singular woman who took indelible pictures of the second world war from London, Normandy and, finally, Germany. The result tells something like the truth. It makes for a far better film.But this is still a movie, with the usual caveats. Miller was an exile from Poughkeepsie, New York. Winslet is not. Only in screenplays, too, does life get the neat narrative frame it does here. We open in 1977, when a brittle Miller, gin at hand, is interviewed by a sniffy reporter. (He is played by Josh O’Connor in one of several small roles taken by big-name actors, suggesting admiration for Miller and/or Winslet, who co-produced the film. See also: Marion Cotillard and Alexander Skarsgård.)Reality is never far away. Flashing back to bohemian prewar France, the drag of beauty standards mean a 31-year-old Miller has already had to reinvent herself after the end of a modelling career. Luckily, she has other talents. She is, she says, a natural at “drinking, sex and taking pictures”. Later, in the London of the Blitz, society snapper Cecil Beaton is catty about her age. More fool him, the movie shrugs.Lee is filmmaker Ellen Kuras’s first feature, and her handling has snap. But the busy script needs a lot of directing. Too often, characters talk in gobs of historical detail, as if they had just read each other’s Wikipedia page. And you may want more time with the actual photographs, so striking are the glimpses here: reportage of young women in air-raid fire masks, the eerily deserted restaurant-land of Charlotte Street. If the film is out to give credit where due, it could take longer reminding us for what.But kudos to Winslet for getting Lee made, and conjuring so vividly the one-off Miller was. The star does what a gifted actor can, treating the factoids as footnotes and bringing to life the person. Some traits are always front and centre: a refusal to simper; sexual freedom; equal parts will and fragility. But the performance comes with surprises too. At its nub, the film asks why Miller hungered to reach wartime Europe, and see the abyss in close-up. She often learns the answers as we do. Like many of us, this Miller can be a mystery to herself.Vérité abounds. In war, bodies are torn apart, of course. But the strangest, strongest section of the story comes when Miller crosses Europe in the last days before German surrender. Friends expect Paris to be a joyous party. In fact, it is a traumatised daze. Unearthly light haunts the road to Dachau. Further on still lies Hitler’s Munich apartment, a near-surreal heart of darkness. In Civil War, the fictional Lee took a similar journey in a movie that a lot of blood could not make serious. In Lee, the sequence lands like the best of the film surrounding it, with a power beyond camera tricks. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from September 13 and US cinemas from September 27
