'September 5' review: Gripping thriller about Munich Olympics
PLOT During the 1972 Olympics, the ABC Sports team finds itself covering a hostage situation.
CAST John Magaro, Leonie Benesch, Peter Sarsgaard
RATED R (language)
LENGTH 1:35
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE A compelling journalism thriller with a fine cast and fascinating period details.
The big story out of the Munich Olympics on Sept. 5, 1972, was the remarkable eight-day run of seven gold medals by Mark Spitz, the American swimmer. Spitz happens to be Jewish, so Roone Arledge, the legendary sports producer for ABC, makes a suggestion: “Ask him how it feels to win a gold medal in Hitler’s backyard.” There’s some murmuring over that, though. Mixing sports with politics? Is that really a good idea?
Then came the gunshots.
That’s how the day begins in “September 5,” Tim Fehlbaum’s riveting thriller about ABC’s attempt to cover a group of Israeli athletes taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Set almost entirely in a single newsroom, “September 5” follows a half-dozen ABC staffers as they shift from covering a feel-good sporting event to a crisis that turns from terrifying to tragic. Starring John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, a young producer desperate to impress Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the film is a fine journalism procedural with a solid cast, plenty of hold-your-breath tension and rich period details.
If you’re old enough to remember the events, “September 5” will have you marveling at how long ago it now seems. It was an era when women — even one as capable as translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) — were still expected to fetch coffee and Germans were still side-eyed as architects of the Holocaust. (“Are your grandparents still around?” one crew member pointedly asks Gebhardt. “Let me guess, they didn’t know either.”) It was also a time when the word “terrorist” wasn’t common parlance. “That’s a charged term,” cautions the illustrious anchor Peter Jennings, played by a spot-on Benjamin Walker.
As the day wears on, Mason must navigate tricky ethical territory. He doesn’t think twice about faking a badge to allow a crew member to smuggle cans of film past Olympic guards, but other dilemmas prove tougher. He’s able to point a hulking TV camera at the terrorists’ hotel room — but since they have their own television on, won’t they know they’re being broadcast? And what about a report (via telex) that the hostages have all been freed? It it solid enough to air?
Meanwhile, Arledge mans the phone, fighting rival network CBS for satellite time and beating back his own bosses, who want to give the story to the news desk. “Sports is keeping this,” he snaps.
Today, those gunshots would be recorded on iPhones and passed around the world in an instant — no cans of film, no satellite sharing. But the journalistic mission would remain the same: to get the story, and get it first.