‘Never Look Away’ Review: Lucy Lawless Directs Fascinating Documentary on Death-Defying Photojournalist Margaret Moth
variety.comJoe Leydon Film Critic The thin line between cheating death and chasing it appears to have been smudged, repeatedly, by maverick video journalist Margaret Moth, the subject of first-time filmmaker Lucy Lawless’ fascinating documentary “Never Look Away.” At least, that’s the impression we’re left with at the end of this compact yet complex portrait of a singularly and aggressively unconventional war correspondent who inspired equal measures of admiration and anxiety among her friends, colleagues and lovers throughout her 20 years of assignments in the world’s trouble spots — Baghdad, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Zaire, you name it, she was there — for CNN.
Something of an enigma even to those closest to her — “I never fully understood what was ticking inside of her” is a comment typical of responses by interviewees questioned by an off-camera Lawless — Moth was fond of proudly proclaiming, “I live life to the fullest.” But it was a life she repeatedly risked by going places, doing things and recording wartime horrors with such little regard for her own safety that a CNN teammate warned her: “There’s only so much Russian Roulette you can play.” It was also a life that she more or less reinvented herself to portray.
Born Margaret Wilson to a working-class family in Gisborne, New Zealand, she changed her name to Moth, dyed her blonde hair jet-black, and routinely applied enough Goth eyeliner to cosplay a young Joan Jett before moving to Houston, Texas in the early 1980s to work as a news cameraperson at CBS affiliate KHOU. (The movie hints, ever so subtly, that covering hurricanes in and around the Gulf Coast area may have been great training for being a war correspondent.) She was an unabashed hedonist, freely indulging.
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