Review: September 5 — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

In this retelling of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games Israeli hostage tragedy, director Tim Fehlbaum has layered not only a supremely human drama, but also stark questions about the people who tell us our daily stories.

September 5 (Paramount Pictures)

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September 5

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

Stars: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch

Writers: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, Alex David

Director: Tim Fehlbaum

 

I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid movies that I know will have a tragic ending. Titanic; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They; Old Yeller — the whole lot of them. Life brings enough real heartache. Why ask me to also invest in movie characters whose misfortunes are going to leave me sobbing into my popcorn?

So, I was predictably reluctant to sit down for September 5, an account of how the ABC television sports team — whose previous idea of The Agony of Defeat was some guy pratfalling on a ski hill — found themselves covering one of the most sickening events of the latter 20th century: the mass murder of the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Upon this nerve-rattling account, director Tim Fehlbaum has layered not only a supremely human drama, but also stark questions about the people who tell us our daily stories, plus a meditation on where the responsibility to report the news begins and, more intriguingly, ends.

It’s the end of a long work day in the ABC Sports control center, located just a few yards from the Munich Olympic Village. Mark Spitz has won another gold medal, and the crew has thrown the broadcast back to New York. Producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) has headed off to his hotel, with strict orders not to be called before 10 the next morning, leaving director Geoff Mason (John Magaro) and a skeleton crew to prepare some segments for the next day’s coverage.

But in the darkness, flashes appear in windows of the athletes’ quarters, quickly followed by what sounds like gunshots. A flurry of phone calls reveals a horrible development: Someone is holding virtually the entire Israeli team hostage. At least one Israeli has already been killed.

It is at this point that Fehlbaum steps back, lets the camera roll, and allows the various story threads to unspool. Arledge returns and, despite angry demands from ABC News in New York, refuses to turn coverage of the hostage crisis over to the journalists.

“It’s our story,” he declares, and starts barking orders to his flustered staff. At first the scene erupts in chaos, but it’s clear Arledge has a plan: He’ll utilize ABC Sports’ signature “up close and personal” style to humanize the hostages and heighten the already unbearable drama. He’s not just reporting the event; he’s creating compelling television.

His director, Magaro, is on board. He’s already displayed his flair for the dramatic by ordering the cameras to focus not on Spitz following his victory, but on a decidedly Aryan-looking German swimmer a few lanes away. (A Jew defeating a German in Munich. Now that’s television!) Determined to provide pictures, and not just talking heads, Magaro trundles one of the 500-pound studio cameras out onto the lawn to get a shot of the Olympic Village. Defying a complete police blockade on the area, he sends cameraman Gary Slaughter (Daniel Adeosun) into the village, disguised as an athlete, with a camera in his duffel bag and film cannisters duct taped to his body. (Oddly, the film omits ABC’s most outrageous stunt that day: buying the signs off an ice cream truck, slapping them on their remote broadcast van, and thus getting waved through the barricades.)

But history tells us Arledge and company may have done their job too well: The live images they were beaming to the world were also being viewed by the terrorists who were holding the Israelis hostage. When ABC showed German snipers positioning themselves on a nearby rooftop, they inadvertently spoiled one of the few solid plans the authorities had for conducting a rescue.

A deathly silence falls over the control room as the snipers crawl away from their posts.

“Was this our fault?” Mason asks. And no one wants to answer that question.

The script, by a three-man team that includes a German and a Swiss screenwriter, weaves in such ethical dilemmas throughout January 5: When does humanizing someone become exploitation? When is the time to turn the camera away?

And, in Arledge’s case, when is it okay to assume a role you’re not trained for? True, early on, the sports producer’s unfamiliarity with the conventions of news reporting enables him to break the rules in admirable ways. But when the wheels come off the hostage rescue attempt, his stubborn insistence on reporting a major development without adequate confirmation threatens to unravel everything he and his team have accomplished.

Luckily for Arledge, his bosses back in New York are less interested in get-it-right-the-first-time journalism than they are in great TV. Five years later, he will be the head of ABC News.

Befitting an industry where the hive rules, September 5’s ensemble blends seamlessly. As Arledge, Sarsgaard embodies the kind of low-key cool and calculating mind needed to navigate the corporate maze of broadcast TV. Magaro’s Mason attacks his job viscerally, ordering camera angles, editing scripts on the fly, soothing the egos that surround him (most notably that of news reporter Peter Jennings, played with measured Canadian calm by Benjamin Walker), and, occasionally, pausing to consider whether or not he’s doing the right thing professionally and ethically.

September 5 could be considered a companion piece to Saturday Night, the recent comedy that recreates the opening night of TV’s Saturday Night Live. Only here, instead of yukking it up, these people are making television as if lives depend upon it.

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