September 5 review
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Writers: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, and Alex David
Stars: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch
Running Time: 94 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
So much of the pleasure in enjoying September 5’s historical thrills is watching how live-television professionals did their jobs in an analogue world. When the Palestinian militants Black September held Israeli hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the ABC studio that covered the event was close enough to hear the gunfire. By checking maps and directories, dialing rotary phones, bathing 16mm film, translating German radio stations, they managed to broadcast one of television’s most tragic stories as it happened.
“In a world where you can show anything, how do you make ethical editorial choices?”
September 5 gives you the impression you’re watching the events in real time from inside the ABC Munich studio, nearly 24 hours of tension compressed into a tight 90 minutes. It’s thrillingly effective to depict the early mundanity of long shift sports broadcasting. A tired Operations Head, Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), takes young Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) through the schedule for the day. On screen graphics are prepared by setting up letter plates (like newspaper printing plates), and interviews with athletes are lined up for extra coverage. Somewhere an air conditioner has broken and needs repair. By establishing the normality of sports broadcasting, we can now understand the abnormal.
While staring out a fire exit door, translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) see flashes and hears the sounds of distant gunfire coming from the Olympic Village where the athletes are housed. Soon phones ring and ABC President of Sports Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) returns to the studio, sleepless and expecting answers. The crew tackle the mammoth task of combining journalism and live broadcasting simultaneously. In an unconnected world, the work of confirming facts is getting people on the ground, gathering first-hand accounts from the authorities in charge, filming with 16mm cameras, or by breaking protocol: pushing unbearably heavy live-TV cameras outside to film the event or even by dressing ABC staff as Olympic competitors to smuggle film in an out of the police quarantine. Truth is never told in the straight line.
Even with prior knowledge of the tragic eventuality, September 5 proves again that how you tell the story is just as important as the story itself. By housing us in a claustrophobic and combative studio environment, the point of view is fresh, even if the history is not. Between Spielberg's Munich, Kevin McDonald’s One Day is September and, more recently, Christian Stiefenhofer’s 1972: Munich's Black September, there is already plenty of feature material to provide those interested with insight. And yet there’s just enough freshness in the framing of September 5 to elevate it as an effective thriller. The breakneck pace helps greatly by barrelling us through the events with not a sliver of extraneous fat.
The cast too is outstanding, delivering their emotions with the kind of lived-in, low-temperature dialogue that feels deeply appropriate to committed professionals in any industry. So often such movies are let down by poor direction and over earnest actors, so keen to prove authenticity they mistakenly forget that people in important professional positions seldom have to prove anything. Few actors are as fun to watch as Peter Sarsgaard. Here is underplays the tension beautifully as a cool toned, bruised television heavyweight holding steadfast against the ABC executives who want to take the story from his lowly sports section team. This is a story for real news anchors, they say. Guiding us through the live TV coverage from his control room, Geoffrey Mason may be young for his position, but the film gracefully allows him to avoid the trite characterisations of a man too naive for his position. Instead he’s ingeniously competent at managing the brutal demands of live television, multitasking his way through an event that changes with every phone call coming through his control board. But he’s not perfect, and the mistakes soon show. Lastly Leonie Benesch is an outstanding moral balance to these men. Her ceaseless passion to find the truth beyond the boundaries of her job description is an inspiring example of a type of selfless journalism we desperately need more of.
The only slight chink in the armor is that the tasteful choice of using only original footage of broadcaster Jim McKay’s coverage creates a sense of disconnect between the studio and the control room, as if the control room exists in a different country, a different building, when in reality they were next to each other. Yet under the circumstances, limiting the broadcast to only real footage used on the day works well to ground the realism for those of us already familiar with events. In a film keen to only raise the dramatic heat slowly and maintain it, avoiding unnecessary distraction by recasting the iconic Jim McKay is the better choice.
The filmmakers aren’t unconscious that their story speaks to our modern media ecosystem, direct to the morality of broadcasting choices. As Bader, Mason and Arledge chat quietly in the hallway, they challenge each other on the ethics of their editorializing. What happens if we show a man shot on live television? Whose story does that become? If the relatives of the victims are watching our coverage right now, what moral obligation do we have to not show that which we can? In a world where you can show anything, ethical editorial choices become paramount. Is it naive to hope that some of those in control of our modern media-sphere take stock of similar questions? One can only hope.
