Review: September 5

Director:  Tim Fehlbaum

Stars:  John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Leonie Benesch

The hijacking of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorist group Black September at the 1972 games has already been given a swift cinematic chronicle at the top of Steven Spielberg’s masterful Munich; a film that waded through the muck and murk behind and following that startling, disharmonious tragedy. Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 zeroes in on the incident as perceived by the sports news crew for ABC – situated within running distance of the Olympic village – and the people who found themselves breaking the story to the world via newly acquired satellite technology. For Fehlbaum, the focus is less on the political reasons and ramifications, but on how news media found itself evolving in real time, and the challenges and precedents thrown up as a result.

It’s a pleasingly grainy and grotty little movie that mostly takes place in one dimly lit room, where jobbing producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) finds himself working around the clock on a story that has suddenly taken over his regularly scheduled programming. His boss – Peter Sarsgaard’s Roone Arledge – is insistent on keeping the story in-house rather than turn it over to the US-based network news team, and so with limited staff Geoffrey uses on-the-fly ingenuity to keep his crew in the game as the German police respond to the rising state of emergency.

September 5 is at it’s most engaging when it illuminates, with nostalgia, the analogue methods used by the team, from walkie-talkies to how logos and subtitles are quickly imprinted onto an image without the luxury of digital technology. The newly available satellite is shared between networks, leading to gaps in coverage and a dogfight over the privilege. The scrappy scramble of this is where September 5 lives, recalling the behind-the-scenes gumption of an Aaron Sorkin joint, minus the wit and indulgent verbosity.

It’s also great to see Magaro in something like a lead for a major studio, especially after enjoying him so much in indie cuts from the likes of Kelly Reichardt and Celine Song. Magaro shows he has the presence to hold a major movie, and there’s some effective support particularly from Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch. For his part, Fehlbaum keeps this thing pretty tight. September 5 feels chunky, fuzzy and period-correct in all the right ways. But the dedication to the central conceit – that we remain with Mason’s team for the entirety of the incident – impinges on the film in ways that can’t be overlooked.

For one thing, anyone familiar with how the story played out will have a good portion of the suspense removed from the movie. That’s inevitable when looking back on a major televised news event from a remove of 50+ years. But more hurtful is that by keeping to this discipline, the last third of the story becomes confused and elusive. Once the drama with the terrorists and hostages escapes the view of Mason’s cameras, the audience is left in the dark with the characters. Fehlbaum uses this opportunity to dig into questions of integrity as Mason has to weigh up broadcasting unconfirmed reports, but the sense of disarray and confusion undoes a lot of the more intense focus felt in the first two-thirds of the picture.

Then there’s the relative disinterest in the events themselves beyond the mechanics of who will survive and who will be caught. September 5 repeatedly frames the terrorist attack against memories of the Holocaust, casting an uneasy and simplistic shadow over a far more complicated set of circumstances. What might have motivated Black September into their violent move against the Israeli Olympic team is completely beyond Fehlbaum’s film, and – for the purposes of the drama here – almost beside the point. In light of current events raging across Gaza, September 5‘s politically apathetic approach feels like a bit of a southpaw. In an effort to appear neutral, the film instead feels cowardly or even inadvertently – and clumsily – skewed. This because it narrows the story to attackers and victims and the associated binaries.

As a time capsule of the sudden invention of instant news, September 5 is a modest but impactful way of spending 90 minutes or so. A siloed investigation of a set of circumstances that broadly changed the way in which developing stories are carried to us. And, in an age of openly re-written history, fake-news and post-truthism, its championing of confirmed sources and journalistic integrity feel absolutely critical. It is perhaps knowing, then, that having made a cataclysmic blunder, Mason is given a pat on the back and a “see ya tomorrow” from his boss, setting the course for a news environment eschewed of accountability.