Live from Munich, it’s Black Tuesday

It’s not hard to understand why Jason Reitman wanted to make Saturday Night, even if audiences and critics largely agreed that the 1975 premiere of Saturday Night Live wasn’t a compelling enough topic for a feature film. Son of Ivan, Reitman’s been a punching bag ever since his all-female 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters tanked; disliked by both culture warriors and film snobs, Reitman’s audience remains… everyone else. A lot of people. Keep in mind he’s worked for two decades now: Thank You for Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air followed each other in the latter half of the 2000s. Perhaps there’ve been diminishing returns, but to my mind, Saturday Night was the first nearly worthless movie Reitman made. With an ensemble cast of young actors, some on the cusp but most still unknown, all he could come up with was cacophony, and a distinct sense that whatever form this show would take once it got to air, it definitely wouldn’t be funny.

Treating the premiere of Saturday Night Live like it was Black Tuesday made the movie even worse, putting it in the same conversation as A Complete Unknown: a frightening sign of the decline in general intelligence across the population. At least there’s a similarly suspenseful control room movie out this season that treats its subject as it were Black Tuesday—ah, it is! Yet ANOTHER movie about a famous postwar event already covered in American cinema. Steven Spielberg’s Munich wasn’t strictly focused on the day of the attack, but where are the movies about things that happened in 1997, 2003, or 2015? Anything, I don’t care—these are “infotainment” movies, they’ve been around all my life and, you know, anything serious works for me. Saturday Night Live? Come on…

September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum and written by Moritz Binder, Alex David, and Fehlbaum, takes place almost entirely inside the ABC control room in Munich on September 5, 1972. A team led by Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, and Ben Chaplin work their way through a routine day at the Olympics when shots are fired, hostages are taken, and people start dying. There’s no time or room to breathe, and while Sarsgaard’s name was floated for a potential Oscar, I’m not sure which acting category he would’ve fit in: although first billed, he has less screen time than Magaro, and sort of disappears in the middle.

He’s the character who waves his wand, the master to Magaro’s apprentice, and even if this is a role Sarsgaard could sleepwalk through and be perfectly solid, he’s amazing as always, soaring past the milquetoast material and demonstrating what makes him the world’s greatest living actor: he’s at once the man with the most integrity, love, and charm; and the most evil, sinister son of a bitch you’ve ever met. Either way, he’s highly intelligent; his characters are lived in, but there’s a remarkable dynamism to all his work, a sense that anything could happen—he’s always vacillating between love and hate, riding the line, everything a movie actor should be.

September 5 may be superficial, but it’s a real movie for people with half a brain; Sarsgaard’s work automatically makes it better than just about everything else released this month. I’m still waiting for movies on Hurricane Katrina, Elizabeth Smart, Malice at the Palace, the Super Bowl Halftime Show 2004, the death of Brittany Murphy, and so, so many more…

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith