September 5: Docudrama Smartly Captures Complexities of Munich Massacre Coverage
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
Tense, powerful, intelligent, and timely, September 5 is an historical docudrama thriller, based around the true story of the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. But rather than focusing on the siege, the plight of the hostages or the politics of terrorism, the film is set in the control room and production facility of ABC Sports.
The flawless script — co-written by director Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David — plays like a taut procedural, following the broadcast team as they shift from covering a sporting event to a hard news story and unfolding nightmare, the likes of which had never before been covered on live television.
As a movie, it’s riveting. It also ends up being a thoughtful study in media coverage very much worth contemplating.
At the centre of the story is up-and-comer Geoff Morgan (John Magaro) who is producing the Olympic broadcast in the control room, a huge career break for him. He’s working directly under the legendary producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), and with his mentor Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin). Also on the team, a young German translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), and doing the colour and news stories, Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker).
Their building is on the Olympic site, about 500 yards away from the Olympic athletes’ village. Late one evening, the crew is wrapping up after their broadcast day, when a few of them hear what sound like gunshots. Appraised of the situation, Morgan confers with them to see what they know. Marianne grabs a walkie talkie and walks up the hill to the Olympic village and reports back: Palestinian terrorists have taken the Israeli Olympic team hostage in their quarters.
From that point the movie goes into high gear as the broadcast team shifts from their speciality of coverage sports to staying on top of events as they were unfolding.
Initially, Morgan’s instinct is to use all the tools at their disposal to cover the story. He wheels a camera outside and points it at the building where the Israeli athletes are being held hostage. The access allows them to show parts of the Olympic village in general.
That includes a photo of a terrorist, head and face covered by a black mask, ominously standing out on the balcony for a few seconds. The police have shut down the Olympic village, not letting anyone in and out. Luckily, Jennings was already inside the village and begins to report what he’s seeing.
As the hours tick by and the cameras are broadcasting live as police try to figure out the circumstances, myriad complex ethical questions are raised about how to cover a story like this as they begin to wonder whether their coverage is creating problems.
Fehlbaum has made a series of terrific choices that keeps this thriller — which feels meaty in a compact running time of 85 minutes — on track without leaning into anything that would feel sensationalized. Nor does it follow a more conventional narrative film structure that makes heroes out of Morgan or his crew. That isn’t the point here.
Morgan and his team struggle to make sense of what they’re covering, even as the film unfolds. The balance between a reporter's desire to get the story on air, and how to explain it to the public is what we’re watching here.
One of the strengths of September 5 is watching Morgan, Arledge, and Bader make increasingly difficult calls about what to air, what to cover, and whether there are limits to what they want to broadcast. Members of the crew bring slightly different points of view to the table.
Weaving those elements into the plot is part of what gives September 5 it’s depth and resonance. And Fehlbaum is amply helped here by a superb cast, who capture the feeling of a typical television control room covering a live, extremely serious event.
Read our interview with September 5 director Tim Fehlbaum
Characters played by Magaro, Chaplin and Benesch carry the weight of that in their performances, all beautifully realized. These are Oscar-calibre performances, in a film that could very well be one of this year’s nominees.
Fehlbaum was also meticulous about the look of the film, with desaturated colour, and recreating the broadcast facility, using vintage professional equipment that feels authentic to a studio in 1972. He’s captured the energy and interaction of a live broadcast.
One of Fehlbaum’s best choices was to use the actual footage of the TV broadcast of the games, hosted by another broadcast legend, ABC sports journalist-broadcaster and chief anchor of the games, Jim McKay. That adds a lot of depth to September 5.
In the film we see Morgan calling the shots in the control room, feeding the latest information to McKay, who we see on the monitors in the control room as he listens, and then reacts smoothly on air. It’s very effective. Seen through the lens of September 5, McKay’s coverage is even more striking for its measured tone, and its unflagging, unambiguous humanity.
The script deals with other issues that were woven into the time. Less than 30 years after the end of World War II, the Munich Olympics, dubbed the Serene Olympics, were supposed to be Germany’s signal to the world that it was a new era and that they’d left the horrors of war behind. And yet as Marianne sadly notes at the end of the film, more Jews were killed on German soil. The hopefulness that surrounded the games in Germany has been dashed.
September 5 does an excellent job of fulfilling the movie experience. But there’s so much more going on here. In our era of oversaturation, a never-ending stream of news coverage, cell phone camera footage, misinformation, knee-jerk reactions and so on, the film is a worthwhile look at how news coverage, at its most basic, is a constant balance of important values.
September 5. Directed by Tim Fehlbaum. Starring John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch. In theatres January 17.