‘September 5’: Journalists Are Not The Real Heroes

‘September 5,’ Oscar nominated for best original screenplay, is nominally a film about the tragic kidnapping and terrorist murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany in 1972. You can’t doubt that the film’s sympathies are in the right place. There are Jewish characters front and center, and on the periphery. The German characters clearly struggle with the legacy of the Holocaust, which, in 1972, was only 27 years in the rearview. If you apply that to today, it would be 1998, the recent past.

But though the screenplay cleverly manages to chart the action of the entire drama, from the initial hostage-taking to the tragic final shootout at a military airport, everything feels cold and removed. The movie makes the odd choice to remain, at all times, in the studios of ABC Sports, which was covering the Olympics for a global audience and therefore had a lot more cameras and reporters available to it than any other media outlet.

SEPTEMBER 5 ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Tim Fehlbaum
Written by: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, Alex David
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch 
Running time: 95 mins

Though the biggest name in the cast is Peter Sarsgaard, playing ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge, he’s actually off-screen for a lot of the movie. The main character is a junior producer named Geoff Mason, played by John Magaro, who, on his first day of the job, has to cover a major news event, a gig for which he’s barely qualified. He acquits himself admirably until he makes a very questionable call toward the end of the drama, but ends up rewarded anyway.

But this is the central problem with ‘September 5’. The stakes of the hostage situation were enormously important to Germany, to the Jewish people, and, ultimately, to the history of the world. Instead, the movie has viewers thinking “that’s not a particularly good Howard Cosell voice impression”. If September 5 resembles any recent film, it’s Jason Reitman’s ugly, self-absorbed Saturday Night, about the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. That film made it seem like everything was at stake, when, in fact, nothing was at stake.

September 5, conversely makes the stakes feel too low. Part of the problem is that, yes, TV trivia dorks like me know who Roone Arledge and Peter Jennings are, but Saturday Night had the still-active Lorne Michaels and Chevy Chase as characters. Millions of people know the names and work of deceased real-life equivalents of the Saturday Night cast, like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and George Carlin. September 5, on the other hand, feels like distant analog history. While terrorists are gunning down Jews, the script focuses on old-fashioned ways of shooting chyrons.

The real hero of the film, a junior German staffer sympathetically played by Leonie Benesch, attempts to grapple with the moral issues at hand, as well as with low-key 1970s workplace sexism. More than the swaggering producers in the booth, she seems to understand the moral implications of what’s actually going on inside the newsroom and out, but is also trying to do several jobs at once. But the film dispatches her to the field for the final third, and doesn’t follow, and then sends her out the door with her backpack, never to be seen again.

Moviegoers also already know the impact, and the blowback, that September 5 created in the world. Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich,’ a bigger, better, and more morally complex film, brilliantly chronicles the brutal aftermath of the attacks. ‘September 5’ hints at that, but it also semi-celebrates the fact that, for our characters, The Wide World of Sports goes on. The attack itself is what matters, not the fact that ABC “broadcast it to the world.” Instead, we get another movie about journalists doing journalism. It’s well-made, tense and jittery. But it’s also about as fresh as yesterday’s news.