NEVER LOOK AWAY (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Never Look Away, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

There's a point near the end of Never Look Away when the documentary jumps ahead more than a decade in the life story of Margaret Moth. Moth was a photojournalist who helped cover conflicts around the world in her position at CNN, and the footage she captured in war zones like Sarajevo, Rwanda, and Lebanon helped people see the horrors and inhumanity of modern-day warfare. A lot of clips are present in Lucy Lawless' debut movie, and they pretty much speak for themselves.

As for Moth herself, she apparently didn't appear in front of a camera with much frequency, and that was especially the case after she was severely wounded while covering the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Many thought she wouldn't survive what happened to her, but she did. Many more thought that would signal the end of her career, but it didn't. Moth kept going.

Something was driving her toward danger, even before she started working in combat areas. In her personal life, she took to skydiving, and before joining a national news network, Moth would seek out the perilous assignments in Houston, especially storms. One shot she captured here shows a car ahead of the news van she was in almost be knocked over by the high winds of a hurricane. It easily could have been her, but it didn't seem to matter or stop Moth from chasing danger whenever and wherever she could.

Whatever that driving force was in Moth's life remains a secret, not only because Moth died of cancer in 2010, but also because she never spoke of her motives or past to anyone—even those closest to her. Could anyone really be close to Moth? A good number of people, especially younger men, wanted to be, and she welcomed the attention and affection while, based on the testimonies of some of those who knew her as well as anyone could, kept her emotional distance. She was physically away from people, too, first by moving to the United States from her native New Zealand and later by heading off to war zones with little notice, as well as even lesser fanfare.

Lawless has a significant challenge with this documentary, which doesn't offer much by way of first-hand accounts from its subject—mainly because they don't really exist. There's a single interview with Moth, sometime following the sniper attack in Sarajevo that shattered and basically removed her lower jaw, and a few audio recordings or writings occasionally pop up here. Even so, Moth doesn't have much to say about herself or her work, except for the obvious—that nothing was going to stop her from doing exactly what she wanted to do. If a sniper's bullet couldn't put an end to her work, nothing would.

The task of explaining Moth's life and career, then, falls upon family, colleagues, friends, and a pair of lovers. The testimonies of CNN co-workers Christiane Amanpour, Stefano Kotsonis, and Joe Duran are helpful, because they witnesses what Moth was like in her element—fearless, relentless, unwilling or, perhaps, constitutionally unable to let anyone or anything get in her way. When other camerapeople ducked and took cover at the sound of gunfire into a crowd during the Bosnian war, Moth stood her ground and got the footage everyone else missed.

The movie has several anecdotes like that one, including one in which she went to a UN camp that was fired upon by Israeli rockets and another in which she couldn't be found when everyone assumed the hotel journalists were staying was about to be attacked. It turned out that Moth was on the roof of the building, with the camera set up and ready to capture what likely would have been her final shot. Without much or any footage of these events, Lawless uses scale models to re-create the chaos of the moment when Moth was shot and the resilience of her standing on that rooftop. It's a striking effect.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the accounts of Moth's personal life, which rely on family members who don't have much to say, except to give some details about the terrifying sketches Moth would make of her childhood, and those two lovers. One is Jeff Russi, who met Moth when he was 17, a pizza delivery driver, and an occasional drug dealer. Moth was 30 or so and loved to party, and Russi was shocked and enamored with the idea that someone as cool as her would believe a nerdy teenager was worth her time.

The other is Yaschinka, a French man Moth met while doing her job, and he's a character, to say the least. Eventually, he starts to talk about and defend himself more than offering any insight into Moth, except his impression that she may have had an unhealthy obsession with rekindling their romance. After the little we do learn about Moth, that seems a stretch.

Because Lawless does have so little with which to work, though, that testimony is one of the final details that Never Look Away has to offer. When the documentary follows that by skipping over the final years of Moth's life, we're just left to wonder if this really is all there could be to this story.

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