One of the more interesting Oscar also-rans this season is "September 5," directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum. The chatter around the film suggests that it was the wrong movie at the wrong time, an account of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis of 1972, told from the POV of the ABC television broadcasting team that covered it. "September 5" depicts the event as an act of terror perpetrated by the Black September organization, and says almost nothing about the underlying Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which some modern commentators have deemed unforgivable in the current political climate.
However, "September 5" isn't really about the hostage crisis. It's about the media's reaction to the crisis, and all the ways that the people in charge of the broadcast, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), make bad calls and set terrible precedents, in the name of getting the story out. Initially, they're set up as the underdogs. The crew stationed in Munich is from ABC Sports, not ABC News, and covering events live as they're unfolding is a relatively new innovation. Much of the film plays like a 70s thriller in the vein of "All the President's Men" or "The Parallax View," with as much focus placed on process as on sensationalism. It's fascinating to watch the television crew at work behind the scenes, getting the cameramen in the right places, trying to ensure new information is confirmed, and juggling all the myriad technical necessities of putting a television broadcast together. An added complication is that no one speaks German except for a single interpreter, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch).
"September 5" makes all the same points as movies like "Network" and "Nightcrawler" about the dangers of reckless journalism, but the difference here is that the wrongdoers are not raving madmen or lurid immoral sociopaths. These are highly trained media professionals who are working under enormous pressure and time constraints. When they realize they've made mistakes that potentially impact the hostage situation, no one is more horrified than they are. It also makes a considerable difference that the events of September 5 are real historical events. I wasn't alive in 1972, but a lot of the archive footage pings as awfully familiar, and I admit I sat up straighter when I realized that the barely glimpsed newscaster being given directions by the control room was Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker). There are ABC logos everywhere, and as far as I can tell "September 5" has no ties whatsoever to ABC or Disney. Paramount is the distributor in the US.
Not being familiar with the actual events, I found the film's suspenseful ending very effective. Even if you know how the crisis plays out, however, there's plenty of tension that comes from watching how the main characters are making decisions in response. Bader emerges as the film's lead, and John Magaro delivers a memorable performance, as a man doing his best to look like he knows what he's doing as the situation grows more and more dire. Peter Sarsgaard is in imperturbable authority mode, and a solid presence as always. Finally, most of the filmmakers are German, and through the Gebhardt character they find a way to include a thoughtful German POV on the tragedy. As a non-American and as a bystander to many of the decisions being made, she becomes the closest thing we have to an audience surrogate.
I understand why "September 5" is being largely ignored, because it's not telling the kind of story that viewers are interested in right now. However, it is quietly one of the better criticisms of the news media that I've seen in a while, and a reminder that there are real, fallible people who decide what we see on our screens, and how we perceive the events of the day. The louder, more pointed satires of the current news ecosystem don't get the point across nearly as well as "September 5," which presents the original sins of live television broadcasting in far more sympathetic, cautionary terms.
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