‘September 5’ review: Munich Olympics massacre, shot-by-shot

The 1972 Summer Olympics opened in Munich, West Germany with 4,000 journalists and 5,000 white doves. It was its first time hosting the Games since you-know-who and the you-know-whats back in 1936. The country hoped to broadcast a message of peace.

Over in the ABC network control booth, however, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of the sports division, is more interested in losers. The bloodless procedural “September 5” starts with a scene of Arledge’s ratings genius at work as he orders his crew to cut away from a triumphant winner to their devastated rival. Failure is where you’ll find humanity and fittingly, the Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum has made a breakneck tragedy about one of the 20th century’s biggest failures: the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in a hostage crisis that starts just minutes into the movie.

Although warned in advance that this exact attack could happen, the Olympic organizers failed to stop the terrorists, and the terrorists in turn failed to force Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to cede to their demands. Meanwhile in the ABC newsroom, Arledge and his colleagues Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) fail to cover the crisis flawlessly, beaming two horrible screw-ups to a live audience of 900 million.

Fehlbaum keeps us focused on the camera crew. Once the first shots are fired, things take off at a sprint. Who’s got a walkie–talkie? Who should anchor? Who spricht Deutsch? The pace stays hectic even when the dash becomes a marathon. Our three leads have three different priorities: Arledge is the humanist; Bader, the ethicist; Mason, the visualist who wants the right images. (“You got it, Kubrick,” one of his men jokes.) Fehlbaum and his co-screenwriters Moritz Binder and Alex David have also concocted a German production assistant (Leonie Benesch) who is promoted to translator and then some, as well as an older German technician (Ferdinand Dörfler) who exists mostly to remind us that the horrors of the 1940s were still very present to anyone over 40. “I still remember exactly what gunshots sound like,” he maintains.

Arledge is a household name with a television career that ranged from the puppet Lamb Chop to “Monday Night Football” and “20/20.” He and Mason share a gold medalist’s drive to compete with the other channels and tend to out-vote Bader two to one. (It’s worth noting here that Bader was the son of Holocaust survivors, although the character is kept too busy to mention it himself.) Mason, who gradually emerges as the central character, has an intuitive sense of when to cut away and when to dissolve. Played in a dissociative fever state by Magaro, he can lose sight of what he might actually be putting on air. (A possible execution of an athlete, for one.) He’s also the youngest of the trio, and you can easily imagine “Network’s” Howard Beale sermonizing about him four years later as the shining example of a TV-weaned generation who worship the tube as “the gospel, the ultimate revelation.”

“September 5” is cut like a modern thriller — it’s all go, go, go — and the cinematographer, Markus Förderer, favors handheld work, as if to stick it to the heavy 1970s cameras that here get laboriously pushed out of the office and up a small hill. The images are so retro-grainy that they look like they were filtered through tweed. Early on while our eyes are still adjusting to the style, the dim bluish lighting and the hectic way people run around grabbing maps and slamming rotary phones almost feel like a send-up of a CIA spy flick. Later, when the gang pokes fun at the local police for attempting to disguise themselves in comical chef hats, it’s momentarily a bleak satire of these Keystone Kops.

Otherwise, this story is strictly contained. There are no close-ups with the victims or the villains or the rest of the German security team that barges into the movie like standard-issue action heroes only to retreat a beat later. There are also no grisly images or passionate arguments that might kick up our own emotions. Instead, Fehlbaum fills the frame with his fetish for tactile objects: stopwatches, soldering irons, stacks of sandwiches, dot-matrix printers. Accustomed to digital effects, we do a double-take when a woman uses her hand to stick the ABC logo on the lens just so.

Fehlbaum is fascinated by how a story gets told and proves the impact of rewinding a shot to play it again in slow motion. The film refuses to stray from the ABC bunker, showing us no more than what the broadcasters have managed to catch on tape via their doggedness and trickery, like forging a fake athlete‘s ID for an employee (Daniel Adeosun) who uses his phony credentials to run reels of film stock back and forth from the sequestered Olympic Village like a one-man relay race. Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

From left, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin and Peter Sarsgaard in the movie “September 5.”

(Paramount Pictures)

One of “September 5’s” ironies is that its breathless content creators seem bored by their own product the second they run out of new things to show. If Arledge was still alive, he’d insist on humanizing the movie’s own script. Yet, the coldness is what allows these TV people to do their jobs. Sometimes they barely even seem to understand the updates they’ve been handed until the anchor repeats them on air. When the facts become too painful, the room stands slack for a second and then carries on. (In recent interviews, the real-life Mason has admitted that afterward, he allowed himself a good cry.)

Benjamin Walker’s Peter Jennings has a jaw-dropper of a line about knowing the kill-zone radius of a grenade. “No offense, guys,” he adds, “but you’re Sports. You’re in way over your head.” If this movie had arrived before “Network” and all the media cynicism that’s since come to pass, it would have dropped jaws, too, especially when sportscaster Howard Cosell bleats, “We’re building up to what I think will be quite the climax.”

But now, the TV has trained us to see everything as sports: dating shows, presidential debates, battlefield yards won and lost. Conversely, we tend to demand political endorsements from our entertainment, and the fact that “September 5” stays several football fields away from taking a stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likely irritate a few people. Better to view it as a film about facing the challenge of not having all the answers. As the veteran newsman Jim McKay sighs: “None of us know what will happen to the course of world history — we don’t know.”