Oscar-nominated Munich Olympics drama September 5 is the wrong film for the moment
When it comes to art, the word 'apolitical' serves largely as a kind of grand delusion. You can't simply shake the meaning and implication out of words and images like they're a dusty, old carpet; and neither can people simply switch off morality and emotion, conscious or subconscious, like a button on a machine.
Such concepts have a hollowing effect on September 5 (pronounced 'September Five'), Tim Fehlbaum's film about the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, during which eight gunmen from the Palestinian militia Black September killed two members of the Israeli team, taking a further nine members hostage. In a failed rescue attempt, all nine athletes were killed, alongside five of the eight Black September members and a West German police officer. It's a moment that's been channelled into worthwhile cinema before: its aftermath was famously covered by Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005), whose script, penned by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, showed far more interest in engaging with the moral and emotional underpinnings of Israeli and Palestinian violence.
September 5 takes a comparatively oblique approach, focusing on ABC Sports's live TV coverage of the event. It indulges the notion that all that really matters is the telling of stories, at any risk or any cost – and, in doing so, takes a stance of wilful ignorance when it comes to both historical context and journalistic ethics. Its final beat, and declaration of concrete achievement, occurs when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) informs us that more people watched their coverage than the moment Neil Armstrong stepped out on the moon.
Instead of politics, we're served borderline fetishistic images of chain-smoking men in shirts and ties – plus a woman, fictional German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) – deeply engaged in the work of problem solving. It's almost entirely set within the studio, dimly and evocatively lit by cinematographer Markus Förderer to look like a mad scientist's laboratory of ideas. Every inch of the screen is packed with rotary dial phones, bulky cameras, thick cables, sweaty brows, and rolled-up sleeves. It's about journalism as hard, rugged work, captured in bracing close-ups. Actors deliver each line with a certain practised bravado, brows furrowed and hands on hips. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay seems based largely on its ability to deliver neat, little quips ('These cops have no idea what they're doing'; 'No wonder they lost the war').
From the very moment the ABC crew first hear gunshots, Fehlbaum's film becomes a single, steady drip feed of adrenaline. Could one of those heavy-duty television cameras be wheeled outside and up into the view of the Israeli team's hotel room? Could one of the news crew (Daniel Adeosun) be dressed up as a US athlete, with a forged ID and film canisters taped to his body, in order to sneak past the cordon? If the German media announce a development, do they really need a second confirmation?
At the forefront of these decisions is Geoffrey Mason, head of the Munich control room. He's played by First Cow 's John Magaro, an actor with a fierce, natural intelligence to him, who can express to the audience directly that his actions have a weight to them, and will breed their own consequences. Yet, Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David's script treats all context, about the history of Israel and Palestine or the political tension already hanging over the 1972 Games, as background noise. There's a line here or there about how West Germany's lack of security at the event was shaped by its desire to create distance between the present and the country's Nazi past. There's a moment when a French-Algerian member of the team (Zinedine Soualem) takes a stand against an anti-Arab comment. The team's only expert in the Middle East, Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), is ushered off screen with a single warning: 'We have to be very sensitive about what we say.'
In any context, it betrays a lack of curiosity. But watched now, at the very same time as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians return to their homes in Gaza, often to find them reduced to rubble, while so much of the media world turns away from them – well, it's jarring. The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn't just wrong: it's laughable.
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