“September 5” takes viewers inside a TV control room in 1972, where ABC Sports broadcasters face an unprecedented crisis: gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black September have infiltrated the Olympic village, killed two members of the Israeli athletic team, and taken nine others hostage.
Humanity has been living with this type of event for over fifty years, and there have been instances where coverage has gone on around the clock for days, so it may be hard for younger audiences to imagine never having seen the likes of it. That “September 5” manages to picture the madness through fresh eyes and make you feel like you’re in the thick of it is a remarkable achievement, even though the movie ultimately thins itself out by glossing over historical and political context and treating the incident as a primer in media ethics.
There had never been a televised event like this before. It took a while to realize that if the entire world could see certain aspects of the crisis live and in real time, that meant the gunmen could also see it, adapt their tactics to counter the efforts of police, and indulge in political theater for a billion-plus viewers.
The ABC Sports team is overseen by network executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who declares that rather than give the story to the news division and let it be reported remotely, they would remain the epicenter of coverage during the timespan of the crisis (slightly less than a day). Arledge is one of two still-somewhat-recognizable TV news names involved in this story, along with future network anchor Peter Jennings. The former is an intermittent screen presence, and after a certain point, Jennings becomes a voice-only character because he’s on site at the Olympic village and doesn’t have a camera available and must call in via phone like a radio reporter. It’s too bad that Jennings’ presence was minimized in this manner, because his knowledge of Middle Eastern politics and knowledge of the Palestinian experience would’ve complicated the movie in a positive way. (As is, we only get little glimpses of his attempts to illuminate the political specifics.)
The real center of the movie is John Magaro as ABC News producer Geoffrey Mason. He’s the one who has to navigate between the demands of his supervisor on site and the big bosses and competitors back home, and make decisions that could mean life or death for people on either side of the lens. You feel Mason’s soul-draining fear of making a catastrophic error in every second that he’s onscreen, even ones where he gets a moment’s rest. The character also becomes a kind of moral or spiritual interpolator when coworkers come at him with personal misgivings or proposals for tactics.
Much of the film’s groundedness comes from Magaro’s anxious and dire interactions with two key coworkers, junior crewmember Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch of “The Teacher’s Lounge”), a German woman pressed into service as a translator; and operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a Jewish New Yorker who is personally invested in the outcome of the event because his family was shattered by the Holocaust and the current catastrophe is unfolding in Germany, headquarters for the genocide. The duets between individual members of this professional triangle are exquisitely written and performed. You understand everyone’s point-of-view.
As directed by Swiss filmmaker Tim Felhbaum, who cowrote the screenplay with Munich-born screenwriter Moritz Bender, “September 5” is not a sprawling epic about mission creep and moral decay in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” but a dialogue-driven journalism thriller in the tradition of “All the President’s Men,” “The China Syndrome,” “Spotlight” or “The Post,” though with an action movie’s pacing. Cinematographer Markus Förderer’s team shoots nearly all of the drama with handheld cameras, often zoomed-in so that only a piece of the frame is in focus. The texture of the image has been roughed-up to look like 16mm film or low-resolution, circa-1970s news video.
This approach evokes the immediacy of the camerawork that was actually happening in the repertorial pool at the Olympic Village. It also makes you feel like you’re jostling among the reporters, editors and technicians in the control room, trying to stay aware of what’s happening beyond your peripheral vision by listening to the overlapping voices and the chatter coming from TV monitors and police radios. (The sound, credited to a ten person team that includes sound designer Frank Kruse of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” ranks with the year’s best; it adds weight and detail and makes the production feel bigger than it plainly was.)
Don’t look for too much context or a sense of a deeper history, though. Either out of a desire to keep a tight focus and a small budget or simply a wish to avoid as much controversy as possible as the bloodbath in the Mideast continues, specific animosities between the state of Israel and Palestinian militants are glanced over, although there are personalized bursts of discomfort when Bader’s righteous anguish collides with the cautions of his coworker Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem), a French Algerian Arab; or when the team debates what to label the hostage-takers (they settle on “terrorist,” a word that’s been used so often by so many different kinds of partisans that it’s lost its sting).
The film’s most intense scrutiny is reserved for details of TV production in the early 1970s, including fabricating new logos with photos and art supplies and then shooting them with a video camera, and very quickly developing 16mm film of events to be shown on live TV (this is where the phrase “Film at 11” comes from). In this specific sense, “September 5” is a great process movie.
The superb cast is led by Magaro, who broke through as a leading man in David Chase’s musical drama “Not Fade Away,” has become one of those rare actors who enriches every film he appears in and is never less than totally believable no matter what role he’s playing. He also has a mix of real-world grit and movie star energy that was more common in the 1970s than subsequent decades. He’s never better than when he’s playing a smart guy in over his head. You can feel him thinking.
The live reportage of the Munich crisis eventually won ABC Sports 29 Emmys and led Arledge to be named the head of ABC’s news division. Arledge’s most famous or perhaps notorious contribution to TV history was persuading ABC to let the news division cover the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis for 444 straight days in 1979-80, amplifying a sense that then-president Jimmy Carter was not strong enough to protect American interests. This in turn helped lead to Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan, who later became embroiled in a constitutional crisis over his administration’s arms-for-hostages deal, and was also alleged to have made secret arrangements with Iranian leaders to delay releasing the hostages until after the 1980 election.
Admittedly none of this would probably make sense to include in a 95-minute procedural about what happened inside the newsroom in Munich in 1972. But it’s worth reading about independently, because it drives home a reality this movie doesn’t get across, even through allusions or inferences: the decisions that reporters and their bosses make on the fly have repercussions that resonate for longer, and go much deeper, than questions of which TV executive is in charge of live news coverage or which broadcast network controls a bloc of satellite time. The butterfly effect is real. It happens over the public airwaves, too.
The infamous image of a hostage-taker in a ski mask, made even more unsettling by the washed-out graininess of the video footage, becomes the emblem of the crisis. It is incorporated into ABC coverage like a brand logo. What we’re seeing in “September 5” is the birth of live news as entertainment. It’s the opening salvo in a long and sadly successful war against journalistic ethics and ideals that would lead to the current pathetic conditions of cable and Internet “news,” which consist largely of “takes” rather than original reporting. That nobody involved in the 1972 crisis could have foreseen where things would go lends poignance to a movie that’s otherwise concerned only with what’s in front of it.
