Lee review – Kate Winslet is an ex-model on a mission in musty biopic

A passion project almost a decade in the making, Lee is the kind of stodgy biopic that feels of a time far before that, a bullet point-ticking list of events gussied up to be an actual movie. The life it’s focused on, that of model turned second world war photographer Lee Miller, is an undeniably interesting one, but it’s only in the briefest of moments that the film justifies why it’s a narrative endeavour rather than a documentary and every one of those moments comes courtesy of its lead.

Related: Dream Scenario review – Nicolas Cage finds unusual fame in smart black comedy

Attached to the project since it was officially announced back in 2015, Kate Winslet makes for a formidable Miller, lifting the film out of anonymity on her shoulders. It’s not hard to buy her as a woman who boasted the looks and then the resolve to go from magazine shoots to the battlefield, a seductive and steely performance that keeps chugging along even when everything around her is losing steam. The film focuses on Miller’s life as an American in Europe as the world teetered on the verge of the second world war. Her modelling career was over and she’d found herself compelled to a life on the other side of the camera, taking pictures and enjoying debauched getaways getting drunk and discussing art with her bohemian friends (early on she confesses that she’s only good at drinking, sex and taking pictures). As the war begins, her need to feel useful in some way drives her to the frontline as she tries to capture the horrors for Vogue magazine.

Meeting Miller as a brash bon vivant, topless, drinking wine and trying to shag Alexander Skarsgård, despite his spotty British accent, the film sets up what seems like a far-less-expected second world war biopic. There’s a gulp of sadness watching her and her arty friends, including Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant, brush off the threat of Hitler as they enjoyed a freedom they wouldn’t enjoy again until years later. It’s the second film at this year’s Toronto film festival, after the Anthony Hopkins-led drama One Life, that explores how one person figured out a way to make a difference at the start of the war and how they were able to live with what they had seen in the decades after. Lee is the far less interesting of the two, because at almost every point, director Ellen Kuras (Winslet’s Eternal Sunshine cinematographer making her debut) and screenwriters Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume take the route more travelled, the film plodding along from one Wikipedia paragraph to the next, with little interest if we’re enjoying or even paying attention to the lesson. Even the structure, with flashbacks interspersed with Miller telling the story to Josh O’Connor’s inquisitive interviewer in the 70s, feels expected, and fails to pay off with a strange and unnecessary double twist at the end.

On her self-insisted mission as war photographer, she meets a twentysomething photojournalist played, bizarrely, by Andy Samberg, and the two pair up for the rest of the film, a relationship that’s never fleshed out beyond circumstance. More convincing is her back and forth with Andrea Riseborough as her editor, the actor once again fully disappearing into her character, and one of the more interesting wrestles in the film is between what Miller thinks people need to be aware of and what Vogue magazine thinks is acceptable.

As convincing as Winslet might be, Lee does mark something of a backwards move. After her excellent, award-winning work as a controversially accented cop in Mare of Easttown, she’s been returning to similarly earthy roots. She was thoughtful and understated in the otherwise middling Ammonite before a raw, naturalistic performance in the gruelling Channel 4 drama I Am Ruth. It’s been gratifying to watch a star of her stature scale back and choose challenge over comfort but Lee feels closer to the kind of film Winslet would have picked in the heyday of her Oscarbait era, not quite as awful as say The Life of David Gale (which was at least hilariously awful) or as dull as All the King’s Men or as baffling as Labor Day, but just as static. There’s nothing new here for her or for us.

• Lee is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date to be announced