Film review: An Awful Lee Big Adventure

Film: Lee

Director: Ellen Kuras

Time: interminable, but officially  1hr 52 mins

There’s a film involving flashbacks, the Blitz and women figuring out who they are. Made in 1995 it was called An Awfully Big Adventure.. Kate Winslet wasn’t in it.

There’s a film involving flashbacks, the Blitz and women figuring out … Winslet in it. … could be called An Awful Lee Big Adventure.

The story of Lee Miller, model turned war photographer who was there in the thick of it, and took the photos to prove it is a great story. It’s a great story somehow, that via hapless alchemy, is an absolute-lee-at-best mediocre film.

It will be considered a great film by many for two reasons, one logically incoherent and one understandable but wrong-headed.

First, it’s a great story (that’s the last time I’ll say that, don’t worry).  That has an aura (we will come back to auras).  Some people seem to “think“ that judging a film about a great topic and brave people doing great (or needed- often the latter is enough to be the former) things as less than great is disrespectful. I am not one of those some people.

Second, it is beautifully acted (more on this below). But a great film is one where, by skill and alchemy, acting, script, direction, structure, editing, score and other things come together and the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  It does not happen very often; there are few great films.  It does not happen here. One outa six ain’t good.

Life is short, so I will list the negatives.

Stick around for the mitigating (ish) circumstances  or skip down to my recommendations for stuff about World War 2 that – imo – gets right.

Disclaimers there are two.

1. I’ve not read the book the film is based on, and nothing I say about the film should be imputed to the book
2. I haven’t made many big budget films. Or mid- budget, or… But I’ve watched my share and kept the receipts. “You’re just some random guy” is not actually the killer counter-argument that you may think.

The negatives

• It’s 1hr 52 minutes but feels loooooooooooooonger.  Its pacing is ropey, the editing unimaginative.  It becomes irritating because you know the bathtub is yet to come.
• It’s both too demanding of the audience and while also not trusting them.  The flashback framing device is hokey (but for real-life biographical reasons was probably inevitable) but that would be okay if the narration was actually used usefully.  We’re left in the dark about things that we could reasonably have explained to us, and then given painful Basil Exposition dialogue by characters at points where audiences could (perhaps) be reasonably expected to know shit (about the shape of the second world war).
• The Blitz kitsch
• The script is so clunky that it almost takes on a clunk-life of its own. Adult human beings say things that no adult human being, especially ones who had been risking their freaking lives in the fucking Resistance would have thought, let alone said.  The actors deserve Oscars just for not corpsing throughout. They are forced by the director to throw the Idiot Ball to each other repeatedly, as if it were a game of volleyball speeded up and with the Benny Hill soundtrack. Which brings us to…
• The score. Did we really need Music To Make You Shiver And Feel Angry on the appearance – on every single fucking appearance – of Swastikas and eagles? Does an audience need to be told that Nazism is a Bad Thing  (n.b. This review is being written a month out from the 2024 US Presidential Election, so what the hell do I know?)
• What I call the Chinatown problem (a film is either about politics and Big Issues or family. If you put your thumb on the scales for mawkish tear-jerker points, you are simultaneously sticking your thumb up your ass and then in the mouth of the audience.).  The delivery of the Trauma Lines (watchers of the film will figure it out. It’s when the anvils drop from the sky with a note saying “this may explain things”) makes the clunky dialogue look positively naturalistic.
• The military  “briefing” she sneaks into is possibly the worst representation of any military briefing ever committed to film. There should be an Oscar category for that. Lee would win (Lee will win a load of Oscars, because idiots will think it is a Great Film).

Honestly, I could go on. But, well, let’s not. Let’s cut to the chase. (2)

The Disneyfication of Everything

If I was only allowed one criticism of this epiclee missed opportunity, and it wasn’t aesthetic it would be this. The makers want to have their cake and eat it. They want to celebrate Miller’s principles and courage to live the life she wanted to.  They want to have the frisson of her maybe-perhaps having roles in they hay with her offsider David (SPOILER: SHE DID).  But they don’t confirm.  They might say “oh, we like the ambiguity.”  I might say this back “Yeah, hide behind ‘ambiguity’ if you like, but you will never convince me this was not a straightforward commercial decision – a film in puritanical 2024 about a woman who explicitly slept around would get bad word of mouth with religious zealots and misogynists, of whom there are many, and you’re trying to recoup your production costs and even turn a profit, so you neither confirm nor deny and hope nobody notices or thinks it is a big deal, but it is because (pauses to shout).  MAKING A COWARDLY FILM ABOUT A BRAVE WOMAN IS ARRANT HYPOCRISY AND YOU SHOULD BE FUCKING ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES FOR CONTINUING THE LONG TRADITION OF AIRBRUSHING THE THINGS OFF REAL WOMEN. AND YES THAT DEFINITELEE IS A REFERENCE TO – OH THE FUCKING IRONY – THE KATE WINSLET COVER ON GQ OR WHATEVER IT WAS.

And they would shake their heads sadly and patronisinglee repeat “ambiguity. Artistic ambiguity.”

And, exhausted like a niece trapped in a car while her uncle and great aunt had another free and frank exchange of views, I would come back with “It’s like the non-lesbianism in Fried Green Tomatoes, or in so many other films.  If you are going to make films about women’s sexuality, may I kindly suggest that you… what’s the right term… grow a pair?”

And everyone watching and participating would be rolling their eyes and begging for it to stop. Like I was with this fucking film.

The positives. (The acting, and I guess the costuming)

The actors almost salvage the unsalvageable.

Kate Winslet two things going for her and they are both frequently on display here (1)

One. She is an extremely good actress. Next level.

Two. She has a well-earned reputation for guts, straight-talking not being a luvvie (her as the nazi-fighting nun in Extras, much?). The aura is brought to the role; it’s a star-vehicle for a star, and she knows what is needed and she delivers.  It’s not her fault that her efforts – and those of her almost equally skilled colleagues is not enough.

Alexander Skarsgaard does all he can in the thankless role of St Victor Lazslo, but after the meet-cute, the script loses interest in him.

Andy Samberg is just so good as the not-love-interest-see-above sidekick.  But also, he’s wasted in the role. Everyone else – Andrea Riseborough  Marion Cotillard etc etc is good too, though they are being directed to Chew Scenery and Emote

Final (ha!) thoughts.

Last year’s BIg World War Two film Oppenheimer at least had some guts. Though it’s unfair to compare Christopher Nolan with most people: the man is bringing an impressive A-game (even if you think Tenet and Dunkirk were kinda clunkers).

Films about women “in” war are really hard to do. We expect our war films to involve a lot of combat. Unless you’re willing to show the Eastern Front (and the problem there is a) Russians as heroes, can’t be having that and b) levels of brutality that no Western audience would believe, let alone tolerate) then you’re not actually gonna get much historically accurate women in actual combat roles stuff.

And the idea that women in war is only of interest if it’s about combat and heroism is… a real barrier to making intelligent films about women. 

Shortly after An Awfully Big Adventure there was a film called Land Girls. It is what I was thinking about when I wrote the paragraphs above. It was neither an artistic nor commercial success.  For reasons of the patriarchy, and narrative (the two are obviously entwined!!), thought-provoking and honest films about women in war are – to my partial knowledge – few and far between.  Please supply examples that show me as ignorant.

Meanwhile, you have better things to do with your life than watch this film, despite Kate Winslet’s absolute best efforts.

Right, I promised some recommendations about World War Two. This is bashed out at speed and if you come back in six months who knows, maybe I will have expanded it. If you have recommendations, please add them in the comments, with a sentence or two.

Books to read

(Mostly by men, sorry. )

Novels written at the time or after by people who were there  (that I can personally recommend)

William Wharton A Midnight Clear.  Americans in the Ardennes, Winter 1944. Not many chuckles.

Nigel Balchin The Small Back Room – cynical, bitter, about courage and self-doubt among young men who can’t fight.

Nigel Balchin Darkness Falls – definitive (for me) novel of the Blitz, written and published during the Blitz. IIRC the government wanted to suppress it. Bitter, brilliant, and the scene with the easily-manipulated minister is a chiller if you are a policy wonk like me.

Nevil Shute  Pastoral.  Bomber Command 1943, a previously successful and linchpin crew is going wrong, and if the Base Commander can’t fix it, more airmen will die than inevitably must. Shute knew war, knew flying, knew people. This is seriously good.

Nevil Shute Most Secret.  Resistance fighters and people who – for reasons of their own don’t much care about the danger in a mission as long as there is a reasonable chance they get to kill some Germans.  Bleak, honest, portraits of people (men and women) under pressure.  To Shute’s annoyance, the book, completed in 1942, was kept from publication until the war ended. You can see why the censors did what they did. It is wonderful but also, very quietly, a deeply disturbing read.

Nevil Shute Requiem for a Wren (one of the finest evocations of the emotional shrapnel left in a surviving body that you will ever read. Careful though, it is a gutpunch from Mike Tyson. It will leave you thinking the same author’s “On The Beach” has a cheerier ending.

Books written by people afterwards who were not there but are worth your time

Marge Piecy Gone To Soldiers. Huge, sprawling, brilliant and verifiably unputdownable.. Focusing on mostly women, in combat and non-combat roles.  The sections in Germany and Occupied France are astonishing. A must read.  (See also Piercy’s Vida and her Woman on the Edge of Time, neither of which is a WW2 novel, but you should read0.

Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow. A Moby Dick for the 21st century.  Lots of weird to do with rockets.  It’s not an easy read, but immensely rewarding. Not sure a lot of women in it.

Plenty by David Hare. A women who was a successful agent in Occupied Europe  can’t cope with the post-war constrictions placed upon her.  The film Lee wants to talk about this, but can’t. 

Memoirs/non fiction

Brendan Phibbs The Other Side of Time:: A Combat Surgeon in World War II..  One of the wisest, most compassionate, frank and thought-provoking books I have ever read, on any subject, ever. (no false modesty, I’ve read a bit). This is a good litmus test, in fact. If a friend of yours reads this and isn’t blown away they have zero judgement (but then again, that might explain why they’re your friend?)

William Wharton Shrapnel Beautifully written, seering, self-excoriating without self-pity

Paul Fussell Doing Battle The Making of A Skeptic.  Tough, unsentimental. Opinionated. 

Footnotes

1. Yes, this is a crass reference to several scenes where Winslet is, for solid artistic reasons, willing to show that she is, gasp, a mammal.
2. Another day I might talk about this and the unintentional (I guess) shout out to The Usual Suspects that. Ask me about what I call the “Robert Englund Problem” if you’re ever bored af.