September 5 Review: A fact based account of a chilling tragedy

PLOT: While covering the 1972 Munich Olympics, the team at ABC Sports find themselves covering the horrifying Munich Massacre in real-time.

REVIEW: September 5 isn’t the first movie about the Munich Massacre. Steven Spielberg brilliantly depicted the events and their aftermath in Munich (perhaps his last truly great film). However, this movie takes a different approach in how it covers the events unravelling in real time from the studios at ABC Sports in Germany. We follow a team of sleep-deprived journalists who are supposed to be there covering the Olympics and find themselves chronicling events that they know can only end in tragedy and will have global consequences, the repercussions of which are still felt today.

For me, the film had particular resonance. Before I started working for JoBlo, I worked in radio as an “op”, which basically meant I handled the audio boards, screened the calls, and ran the operations side of live radio broadcasts. Whenever big event happened, everyone working that day went into overdrive, and no movie has ever captured what it’s actually like to be in the thick of things in a newsroom as well as September 5 has. The thing people don’t get about these events is that you’re running on adrenaline, and you have to make real-time calls on what you should or should cover without the benefit of context. I vividly remember working the board during a horrifying school shooting here in Montreal and the whole crew having to make snap decisions about what information should and shouldn’t be conveyed on air.

While this no doubt sounds grim – and it was – your adrenaline goes into overdrive, and you don’t really pause to think about how tragic things are – that comes later. September 5 brilliantly depicts that vibe, as John Magaro’s Geoffrey Mason, a new associate producer, shows up to work thinking he’s going to be covering sports and winds up helping literally write history as it unfolds.

Running a taut ninety minutes, the propulsive editing and pace makes us feel like the journalists themselves must have felt, with them alternatively energized and repulsed as they plough ahead with the coverage. All of the journalists are shown to rise to the occasion, with Peter Sarsgaard’s Roone Arledge, the head of sports, fighting to keep the ABC News team from taking over, instead entrusting his team, which includes a young Peter Jennings (played by Benjamin Walker), and a lot of rookies who are untested in covering event of this magnitude. Standouts include Leonie Benesch as the crew’s German translator, who becomes invaluable as the day goes on, while Ben Chaplin’s Marvin Bader fights to keep the journalists in-check. With so much conflicting information coming in, he shows us how hard it was to figure out what should be reported and, most importantly – what shouldn’t, as the terrorists themselves were reportedly watching ABC News coverage the whole day. John Magaro, who’s quickly rising as one of the best of a new generation of character actors, is superb as the plucky, creative, but occasionally hard-headed and impulsive Mason, who, like everyone else, isn’t immune from getting things wrong in a situation where there’s little margin for error.

Director Tim Fehlbaum has crafted an invaluable historical document that resists the temptation to sentimentalize or sensationalize events. The soundtrack is sparse, and the camera never leaves the news studio, with the efforts of sports journalists Jim McKay and Howard Cosell documented through archive footage. The only problem with September 5 is that everyone in the cast is so uniformly excellent that no one ever gets the chance to dominate (uniquely. – Paramount has chosen not to campaign anyone from the cast in the leading actor category). That might keep the film from earning the awards attention it deserves, as it’s so impeccably crafted and unshowy (for lack of a better term) that it comes off as effortless, even if it’s anything but. It certainly deserves its place in the pantheon alongside All the President’s Men and Broadcast News as far as great films about journalism go.