Lee (2024)
Screenwriters: Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, John Collee
Director (Debut): Ellen Kuras
Starring: Kate Winslet, Alexander Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Andrea Riseborough, Marion Cotillard
Dear Kate,
In my younger years, I had a lot of fight in me. Now I realize that fight energy just causes more fighting. What is it we’re fighting for? Does life need to be so contentious?
What if, instead of fighting, we focus on the fire? Fire does not just destroy—it creates. It recreates. With fire energy, we have life, and we flow and play the chords and show the truth, slowly, steadily, subtly.
I think this latter way is the wisest approach. It is what Lee Miller did with photographs. It is why the Civil Rights Movement gained traction. It is the way all Light works in this world. It just has its way.
I drove an hour to see the film Lee, in which you play the photographer Lee Miller. I’d seen only one preview for it, a couple of months ago, and I knew this was a movie I needed to see. Some movies get a lot of press and a lot of money supporting their success. Other movies get made, wonderfully, and fall off the radar. (Like Sing, Sing. I missed that film in the theater, and now I am always scrambling to find it streaming somewhere. I like what A24 is doing.)
Let me tell you what I see, watching you play Lee Miller, this 1940s model and provocateur turned photojournalist for Vogue.
I see the power of art in film. I see the power of acting, and how a craft that seems so—silly? periphery? to some—can be so impactful and important to waking us up. As a teacher, I cannot communicate with factual information the kind of performance you give us in the backdrop of World War II, of a brave and bold and tenacious woman who sees the perils of abuse of power so up close.
And the film Lee has come out at a good time to enlighten us all about how people rise to power who are not worthy of the title. We see how someone can gain popularity even when the person is not to be trusted. Now, as then, we remain, as a populace, so mired in conflicts of one side or the other, of pointing fingers, of the inflammation of our psychic wounds, of ignorance, anger, and toxic patriarchy.
I am selective about the films I watch. Lee has a hum and a vibration of integrity, and it highlights a different kind of women’s leadership. I believe that occurs because it is the directorial debut for Ellen Kuras. It is a film about a woman, made by a woman, written mostly by women, and not shying away from the historical accuracy and fierceness that is commonly attributed to male directors and filmmakers. Not only does this film reveal to us the ways in which our negative power structures repeat, but it shows a woman in wholeness and flesh, and with complicated and paradoxical tendencies. She is real. (Perhaps Kuras can do this so well because she is from New Jersey? New Jersey is a tough jawn.) For this embodiment of the feminine, I thank you. I am aware that characters written this fully, for women, are hard to find. And I also feel in your presence, such awareness of the grace and good fortune, that you are able to do this work as an artist. Many actors who want to soar, who have something special inside, cannot find their “in” or their way. There is just not enough gold in the industry, yet there’s plenty of cheap money.
While I think young people would benefit very much from seeing Lee, to inspire them about what women can do, to show the history and effects of war without detailed scenes of combat, we are challenged with western society’s strange mores about breasts, hmm? In many places, adults are more approving of young men and women watching blood and gore and guns and murders on screen than seeing—in tasteful ways—the naked women’s bodies who carried us all in order to be born into this world. That was Lee’s knowing, and yours, too. It is why there is no shame present in the film, for a woman to show off her natural beauty. (These sacks on our chests keep people alive.)
Your face in this film, Kate, stays with me. You become Lee, and this is what separates true art from mere entertainment. In movies that are art, the actors are not really acting. They are becoming. They become.
I still cry now, in reflecting upon your face. These images Lee saw, which you saw, which I have now seen.
Thank you for showing women in their fullness, through your characters, Kate, as they age. These women you choose to play are themselves, and not caricatures or stereotypes. They are made of soul and grit and mind, and certainly not straw. You also did this with HBO’s Mare of Easttown, and that setting, for me, is close to home.
If we’re not fighting, we’re probably crying. How long will we cry about the cruelty of this world, which we see inflicted again and again? Maybe there is nothing wrong with us crying. Maybe the key is, we just keep crying, and we do it in the open, without shame. We stare into the lenses and we let people see.
Love,
Ms. Wonderful
Speaking of photographs, view my vision of Female Pope on Instagram’s Rose Arts & Healing Page. She has some things to say about the state of the nation’s politics.
This is another great article. I have seen the movie yet, but wish to more than ever after reading this.