‘September 5’ Review: Taut Media-Critical Control-Room Drama Reveals How a Hostage Crisis Forever Changed TV News
On Sept. 5, 1972, millions watched a tense international hostage situation unfold live on ABC television, as members of a militant Palestinian faction calling itself Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich and held the Israeli team hostage. In “September 5,” we watch the sports crew of an American TV network step up to the challenge of covering such a monumental event. For better or worse (be assured, the movie leaves room for debate), their decisions made history, as the incident fed on media attention, and ABC became the first network to broadcast an act of terrorism on live TV.
Even those who weren’t alive at the time likely have a pretty good idea of what happened, thanks in part to Steven Spielberg, whose film “Munich” opens with a reenactment of the same massacre. In the nerve-racking opening minutes of that movie — the second-most-serious of Spielberg’s career, after “Schindler’s List” — the Jewish director points out one of the core reasons that Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s focus on the media makes sense here: ABC’s live television coverage was so thorough that both the terrorists and the hostages’ families were able to follow along in real time, learning what the authorities were doing via the broadcast.
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Details like that raise important ethical questions about the incident that still echo today, as countless crises have since received similarly tricky on-the-fly journalistic judgment calls — though none has yielded the record 29 Emmys (a mix of sports and news trophies) that ABC collected for its coverage. Those awards celebrate the achievement, but skip over some of the pricklier philosophical aspects of the control-room scramble, which Fehlbaum weaves throughout his economical 94-minute docudrama. The film’s relevance is also boosted by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, as the repercussions of last year’s Oct. 7 attack continue to unfold.
Fehlbaum’s brusque, no-nonsense treatment, which he co-wrote with Munich-born Moritz Binder, doesn’t concern itself with the politics of the massacre. In fact, those interested in what happened (hoping for a more “Munich”-like approach, perhaps) may be surprised to find that the film’s reenactments don’t depict Black September actions at all, but rather what the ABC Sports team was doing throughout. The Spielberg film this most resembles is “The Post,” in its flurry of trying to act responsibly amid the incredible pressures of a breaking-news environment.
The seasoned shot-caller here is Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who springs into action the moment gunshots are fired off-screen, insisting, “We’re not giving this story to News. … Sports is keeping it.” Thirty years later, in his obituary, The New York Times described Arledge as “the most important behind-the-scenes figure in the television coverage of the major events of the last half century, from the Olympics to the boxing matches of Muhammad Ali in the 1960’s to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.”
“September 5” takes us behind the scenes of the 17-hour ordeal to see why that is true, beginning shortly before the attack, until just after the tragic finale, when Wide World of Sports host Jim McKay famously confirmed the chilling news, “They’re all gone,” on air. Still, as an in-the-trenches account of how ABC Sports approached the story, the film focuses primarily on a young, ambitious producer (played by a period-appropriate-looking John Magaro) whose actions are directly informed by veteran sports broadcaster Geoffrey Mason’s memories of events.
The ABC Sports team is tiny and almost entirely male, with the exception of a German-speaking crew member named Marianne (“The Teacher’s Lounge” star Leonie Benesch) who plays an important role throughout. The way she’s treated — and repeatedly underestimated — on account of her gender brings yet another layer of critique to the movie’s complex power dynamics, which reach upward to the more cautious corporate players, like operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin).
ABC Sports may have gotten the story, but they also got it wrong, prematurely repeating an unconfirmed report that the hostages were recovered safely. Moritz and Fehlbaum’s matter-of-fact script lacks the punchy pressure-cooking sparring quality of inside-baseball series such as “The Morning Show” or Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” which can leave one feeling like the real story is happening elsewhere — and it is, since there’s only so much that news crews can extrapolate from telephoto lenses trained on a faraway balcony.
When events like that are happening live, our imaginations tend to fill in what can’t be seen with the worst. In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened in advance doesn’t preclude us from wanting to better know what happened. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom: the significance of the words “as we’re hearing,” versus the reality of what transpired during the climactic disaster at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase (as detailed in Kevin Macdonald’s excellent, Oscar-winning doc “One Day in September”).
Multiple well-told accounts already exist of the Munich massacre, which makes the movie’s blindspots fairly easy to forgive. Fehlbaum presents this almost like a documentary, using handheld camerawork (and digital post-production that suggests it was shot on vintage high-contrast 16mm film stock) to inject a sense of slightly manufactured realism. Not all the cast members got the memo; some of the performances seem stilted opposite Sarsgaard and Magaro, whose characters are torn between fear of uncertainty and a desire for accuracy at every moment. They’re in unchartered territory here, facing tough calls at every turn, like, “Can we show someone being shot on live television?”
“This isn’t a competition,” the higher-ups remind, but it’s hard to convince the Sports division of it. This is the Olympics, after all, where everyone’s bent on winning and the rules are being written as they go.
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