About Lee and the missed points

So many choices. So many of them baffling.

Assume spoilers and overt discussion of sexual violence and the Holocaust.

Lee is frustrating. It wants to be so many things: an awed hagiography of a woman who bucked convention and lived by her convictions; a nuanced portrait of a woman who made self-involved, impulsive choices; a warning about the horrors of war and hatred. While accomplished and elegant, it fails at all three. It pulls punches where it shouldn’t, which means others glance off awkwardly. And it fundamentally misunderstands almost everything it needs to know about the Holocaust.

Lee opens with the old hat interview format; Josh O’Connor’s boyishly arrogant interrogator squaring up against a cosmetically aged Kate Winslet. Decades of Hollywood screen craft have done nothing to convince me that having to age anyone on screen is ever a good idea; the makeup and effects get better, and occasionally an actor plays the physicality with restraint, but the voice is usually wrong. No matter how you handle it, it’s hokey as fuck—and the entire framing does Lee a solid disservice from the outset. It could lift out and it would do the film no harm at all; in fact, it would improve the stop-start of it all. The story is a little patchwork at times, but transitions in time can be handled more smoothly, and should have been.

Leaving that aside, we’re introduced to a woman who claims her three skills are “drinking, having sex and taking photographs”—and it goes on to show two of them enthusiastically while mostly hinting at the middle one coyly.

It’s a weird choice: the film insists on investing time in showing her relationship develop with Roland Penrose (without ever mentioning she was married to someone else at the time) but then sidelines him as a vaguely posh and whiny drag on her attention and attitude to the war—hers being to race to the front line while he develops camouflage paint techniques that he practices on that well-known feature of soldiers and tanks: his girlfriend’s tits. It then abruptly introduces a warm dynamic with David Scherman (without ever acknowledging—unlike her archives—that they were lovers too), but treats him very much as a random prop to press buttons.

While together these vaguely reinforce her determination to do exactly what she wants, it falls flat since no-one was pulling for the alternative. Heading home to Penrose—a woefully wasted and miscast Alexander Skarsgard, who cannot pull off an upper-class British accent to save his life—is a damp squib compared to unveiling the then-unimaginable hell-on-earth of concentration camps. And Scherman, well… we’ll come back to him. But neither relationship does much to enrich the image of a woman who put her principles before other people when she felt she needed to.

So here we have a woman that director Ellen Kuras wants us to see as uninhibited and unashamedly sexual having loud sex behind closed doors. Peeling a layer back, it could be a charitable act to avoid overtly sexualising Miller, who later reveals a horrific childhood assault (that was even worse than the film suggested, leaving her with gonorrhea). But that’s when the film takes its boldest step—and most misguided.

The sickening revelation comes in the wake of Miller discovering her most gut-wrenching images—of emaciated bodies piled high, and brutalised children rearing back from her camera lens—haven’t been published by British Vogue. She sees it as a betrayal of abused girls (and there’s been a running theme of her defending young French women: one taken advantage of by a German soldier and shamed for “collaboration” by her community, another nearly raped by an American soldier). It’s understandable, and of course it’s natural for the writers to want to link that age-old violence against women and girls to the general horrors of war. But it misses the point rather spectacularly.

To put it bluntly, borrowing from Elie Wiesel: the Holocaust was not about man’s inhumanity to man (or woman). It was about man’s inhumanity to Jews. Specifically. Horrifically. A point that Lee absolutely can’t grasp. A friend emerges from hiding in the French Resistance and has to immediately tell (Jewish) Scherman that it’s “not just the Jews”, going on to list the others whose faces don’t fit the Nazi rhetoric. Which misses the point that with one notable exception—anyone else targeted by ethnicity, like the half a million stolen Romani souls—these “political” or, as we might consider them now, identity-based targets were considered the result of Jewish influence and depravity. Jews were blamed for the existence of any behaviour, belief, or ideology the Nazis abhorred. Which doesn’t make the non-Jewish victims any less victims or any less important, but it does mean we cannot, should not, and must not universalise the Holocaust.

If the only way we can find it in our hearts to feel empathy with a group targetted for extinction through industrialised mass murder is to think “but what if they were like me”, we have failed as humans. Niemoller meant well, but we should move past that simplistic construction. Likewise, Lee has the best intentions in asking us to look into a child’s face and feel the terror of being the victim of sexual violence—but that little girl was only there because she was Jewish.

And so we come back, as promised, to David Scherman. I can’t say enough good things about Andy Samberg, who absolutely did the best he could with very little on the page, and who let his natural likeability infuse his first non-comedy role. But as the trains full of bodies are cracked open and Scherman and Miller retch into the scarves tied over their noses, the camera doesn’t know what to do with him. It’s her film but, you know, these are Jews and he’s Jewish. We should probably acknowledge that somehow…? Eventually, after reenacting the staging of Scherman and Miller’s famous shot of her taking a bath in Hitler’s tub (in which he’s just shown being dragged in, mildly shocked, and pressing a button) Scherman is finally allowed to crack. He’s given half a minute to mumble “all those people… they were my people”; we linger on her reaction to his grief and then we’re back on the road.

It’s a shame because there’s a good deal of talent packed in to the square inch of footage, but the whole film is ironically steeped in woolly compromise. Perhaps another problem was adapting the script from her son’s book; involving family so often makes biopics a bit muddy and misty-eyed. In general, though, I’d rather watch a film that takes big swings even if they miss. Lee takes far too few swings, and the few that strike hit the wrong target.