‘September 5’ Review: Can Journalists Be the Heroes in a Story of Deadly Terrorism?

Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5,” which premiered on Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival, takes a story that seems to call for an expansive approach and situates it almost entirely within a couple of dark rooms. It focuses on a real event, the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and turns it into a procedural that follows not the terrorists or the athletes or the authorities, but the overworked crew of TV reporters trying to figure out how to cover an attack that took the world by surprise.

“September 5” is hardly the first film to deal with what became known as the Munich massacre – the documentary “One Day in September” won an Oscar in 1999, and Steven Spielberg dealt with Israel’s reprisals in “Munich” six years later – but it’s one that finds a new way into a story that has become sadly familiar. By turning the cameras not on the rooms where the athletes were held captive or the runway where they were all killed in a failed rescue attempt, but on the bank of monitors that brought that story to the world, Fehlbaum has gone against the grain of the story but managed to find a potent way to focus on the array of moral dilemmas it raised.

You could call it a cousin to “Munich” and “One Day in September,” but also to journalism-centric films like “Spotlight,” “She Said” and the documentary “Collective” – though it’s conspicuously missing the note of triumph found in those films when the reporters landed their stories.

In this case, those reporters, producers and technicians went to Munich from ABC Sports thinking they were covering an athletic competition. And for the first week of the Olympic Games, that’s what they did. The film takes its time laying the groundwork by showing the daily business in ABC’s offices near the Olympic Village: ABC Sports president Roone Arledge stands in the back of the control room overruling other producers and invariably making astute decisions, newcomer Geoff Mason (John Magaro) eases into his first major live-TV assignment and translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch, the star of last year’s German Oscar entry, “The Teacher’s Lounge”) is indispensable to the team.

The setting is a dark control room and a small warren of offices that surround it, and the approach is that of a granular procedural: The crew looks at tape, does tech checks and gets ready for the morning broadcast without any sense that they (or the filmmaker) are in a hurry to get anywhere. And then there’s noise from outside, and somebody in the hallway says, “Are those gunshots?”

They are gunshots, coming from the nearby Olympic Village, where eight members of the Palestinian organization Black September have scaled the fence and taken hostages among Israeli athletes and coaches, killing two in the process. Arledge jumps on the phone and pleads for earlier access to the satellite that will carry ABC’s live coverage back home, but he figures he only needs an hour. “The Germans will have this shut down in no time,” he says.

The Germans don’t shut it down, of course, but we don’t really know what’s happening with negotiations or police action because the film remains stubbornly contained within the walls of ABC’s facilities. Even with a terrorist attack unfolding 100 yards away, the action we see is mundane: film is developed, wires are spiced, phones are taken apart and jury-rigged so that reporter Peter Jennings’ dispatches, which are coming in over a walkie-talkie from the athletes’ village, can be put on the air. The confined spaces are almost claustrophobic, and most of our glimpses of the outside world come on monitors in the control room.

Meanwhile, questions mount for Arledge, Mason and crew; this, after all, was a time when people usually found out about terrorist activity in the next day’s newspaper, not on live TV. There are arguments over whether it’s OK to use words like “terrorism” and “guerillas,” and what they should do if the live cameras capture images of people being shot. And do they give their footage to CBS in order to prevent that rival network from taking its turn on the satellite? (Yes, but only because one technician figures out how to superimpose “ABC” over the corner of the image.)

“Our job is really simple,” Arledge says at one point. “We put the camera in the right place and we follow what happens.”

The moral issues spill off the screen into the theater, too. In a movie like this, with reporters working desperately to cover the story that’s unfolding in front of them, the audience unavoidably finds itself pulling for the news crew to succeed. But just about everybody who watches this film knows that the story will end in tragedy – so how can you root for the journalists when their version of success simply means bringing the world the news of a mass killing?

The stakes in this room of reporters, producers and technicians are high, but nowhere near as high as the stakes for the athletes bound and held at gunpoint a couple of blocks away. It’s hard to watch “September 5” without feeling some serious ambivalence – but in a way, that’s one of the strengths of the film, because it embraces that ambivalence as a necessary part of the story.  

That makes the film a valuable addition to the rosters of both journalism movies and terrorism movies, with an ending that manages to deliver a quiet gut punch even to those who know where the story is going. It doesn’t really make sense that the way to tell this story is by watching a bunch of people who never leave their darkened room 100 yards away from the action, but “September 5” somehow persuades you that it’s an effective approach after all.  

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