By Lindsay Traves | Film | December 18, 2024 |
Whispering at a time of bombastic awards contenders is a ninety-something minute historical feature that could warrant a totally different kind of dancing in your theater seat.
Told not quite in real time, September 5 chronicles the fast-paced reaction that the ABC Sports 1972 Munich Olympics news team had to a hostage crisis, and how they chose to cover it by being the boots-on-the-ground journalists. Less than thirty-years after the end of the second world war, the Olympics were held in Munich, Germany. During the games, eight members of the militant organization, Black September, infiltrated the Olympic Village, killing members of the Israeli team then taking nine more of them hostage. News of the situation bled quickly through the village and the media, and with the ABC Sports crew live in attendance, a power struggle and a test of journalistic grit sends the sportscasters into covering a danger zone.
This film is held firmly between the walls of the newsroom, but it never feels restrained by them. Instead, it uses the physical barriers to highlight the size of the situation and just how close this crisis was to a group of people who had only really prepared themselves to feed live boxing and gymnastics results to their anchor. Director and co-writer, Tim Fehlbaum, never makes the walls feel like they’re closing in on the team, but instead like they’re an iron barrier separating them from a different kind of chaos. The movie feels as large as the international news story was, and that’s because of the crafty use of the set, the direction, and the performances of the actors.
Everyone brings “behind-the-eyes” subtlety to their performances here, particularly Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt, who is a stand-in for the German people. Her skills as a translator mean she is often first to receive and react to information, and her pragmatic character prioritizes passing that information along, leaving her to quietly react in a room full of people from a foreign power that was recently her country’s enemy. Then there’s John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, the real man who at a fresh 30 was called upon to command an entire newsroom. Though the real Mason is not Jewish, the actor seems to bring some of himself to the role, again behaving pragmatically and swiftly out of necessity but still contending with the emotional experience of covering such an event.
Creating stories around real events, especially one that netted a slew of archival footage, seems a challenge Fehlbaum was ready to take on. With his craft teams, they created a set that seems true to a 1970s newsroom and allowed his cast to lean into versions of their real-life counterparts who were probably not seen enough to require any impersonation. A bold approach to portraying host, Jim McKay, avoids feeling uncanny, hokey, or like an impression and functions to treat him like a talking head so segregated from the frantic newsroom, trying his best to continue to give news to the people at a time where to-the-minute information is imperative. Handheld cameras and crafty zooms are what make the room feel tight and overheated while dynamic moving shots create size, space, and breathing room.
It’s nearly impossible to completely separate the experience of watching a film about Israeli hostages from current events. While September 5 is hardly politically neutral, it is never trying to tell a story outside the walls of its 1972 newsroom. The history that colors the events of this film and this moment is what’s important to the story, and it never shies away from what made this more than an Olympics broadcast.
Different characters (based on the real people present at this event) are given their times to react; the Jewish American journalists (one specifically still reeling from the Holocaust), the German translator (who seems to be a composite representation of the Germans present in the newsroom), the anchors, and the broadcasters have the opportunity to contend with the idea that a Germany trying to scrub its post-WWII image was home to an event wherein Jewish people were held hostage and killed. A striking moment that could be its signature is when the team decides what word they should use to refer to the militants, contending with various loaded language. It’s all the more compelling in the current climate and in the same year where The Brutalist portrays struggling Jewish immigrants escaping the Holocaust and comparing their experiences to choosing to emigrate to Israel. It’s because the movie spends time discussing the context that the story feels important, making it, perhaps incidentally, a conversation about the climate and not just a spicy story about a bustling newsroom.
September 5 is a heart-pounding portrayal of a newsroom working at the top of their game when it seems impossible anyone could do so. In a lot of ways, it’s a love letter to journalists and a grimace at news media companies, told at a rapid-fire pace while still in the vein of All the President’s Men or The Post. Stories have been and will continue to be told of the Munich Olympics, and Tim Fehlbaum told what might prove to be an urgent one about one handful of people who stepped up during an unimaginable time.
September 5 is in select theaters December 13, 2024 and in theaters nationwide January 17, 2024