SEPTEMBER 5. Being of a certain age and something of a masochist, trigger warnings aren’t really my thing. Times being what they are, though, it only seems appropriate in this case to preface these remarks with the disclaimer that September 5 centers its narrative on one of the more broadly visible events in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not the forum to attempt to parse the vagaries of that conflict, nor am I the person to publicly undertake such an investigation, so I do not intend to do anything of the sort. This is, ultimately, a movie column, and while I understand that to attempt to isolate it from global events would be folly (and more than a little disingenuous), the movie in question is a rich enough text, and gets at something even more immediately topical and universally resonant than the conflict in Gaza, that can be explored and unpacked without drawing lines or pointing fingers. Maybe that’s a cop-out; we shall see.
The 1972 Munich Olympic Games were heralded — not least of all by the government of the host nation — as a great, serene, international coming together, “the cheerful games,” with the not-so-veiled imperative that the world forget (or at least forgive) the fact that Germany had last hosted the Olympics in 1936, with Europe on the precipice of an unprecedented war. The ostensible and heavily promoted tranquility of the event was ruptured, of course, when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage in their quarters in the early hours of September 5. Clearly, this is the inciting incident around which the movie in question is constructed. But the fascinating, deceptively innovative and insightful aspect of its approach is in retelling the story of that day from the perspective of the ABC Sports broadcasting team, who were the only representatives of a news organ with the ability to report on the events in real-time.
To step back yet again, September 5 is an object of fascination to me in part because the mid-20th century was a period not only of seismic socio-political tumult but of rapid and palpable technological advancement. As the opening frames of the movie intone, the 1972 games were to be covered with previously impossible totality, with roving cameras and a round-the-clock satellite feed to be shared among the American television networks. Every athlete apartment even had a color television capable of receiving broadcasts from nearly all the participating countries (a luxury with unforeseen consequences, as it would turn out). The ability to document and share the games with the world represented a pinnacle of information technology but, as the film pointedly reminds us, that technology was still extremely tactile, collaborative and controlled by instant-to-instant human decision-making.
And so, as the pre-dawn hostage-taking reshapes the narrative of the days to come, the nerve center of ABC crackles with the imperative to pivot and re-tool their operation, at the head of which sits Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the appropriately cynical, market minded head of the sports division. Directly under him, running the control room with nearly no preamble or preparation, is director Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), working most closely with Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), a newly hired and astoundingly resourceful German translator.
Leveraging the network’s access to the satellite and fortuitously embedded combat journalist Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), the team reorganizes itself as a documentary film crew, using every resource and tactic available to broadcast the events of the day to a recently available world (a pre-credits title card informs that 900 million people watched the broadcast).
September 5, written by Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and Alex David, and directed by Fehlbaum, progresses with the breathlessness of the best action thrillers, presents a seemingly flawless re-creation of its time and place and is defined by performances from its leads and supporting cast that rival anything from the prestige camp (can’t ignore awards season altogether). Within a surprisingly concise runtime, the movie somehow maintains a remarkable balance of tension, tautness and narrative depth. And, most fascinatingly, it casts an unjaundiced eye on the social and ethical implications of the birth of new media, drawing chillingly direct parallels to our current moment by examining the weight not only of moment-to-moment decision making but of countries and cultures attempting to manipulate narratives in pursuit of what we might now call optimized optics.
In allowing the ethical ambiguity of the moment to linger on screen but without casting judgment, September 5 speaks to a time of transition, of the mass commodification of information and the burgeoning crisis it might create, with a clarity, subtlety and unsparingness that seem to have largely fallen out of favor. And, in so doing, it casts a disproportionate shadow. R. 95M. STREAMING.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in There’s a Fish Market Splashing into Eureka.