It's often been the case that Oscar-recognised documentaries get repurposed as based-on-true-events drama: much as 1996's When We Were Kings surely factored into the greenlight for 2001's Ali, so too 2008's Man on Wire begat 2015's The Walk and 2014's Citizenfour begat 2016's Snowden. "This story commands respect and wins prizes" is the underlying principle of all these fictions-based-on-fact, and there must be executives who only need to hear that before reaching for the studio chequebook. It's possible, then, that this week's September 5 has been kicking around as an idea ever since Kevin Macdonald's One Day in September won the Oscar back in 2000; possible, too, that it was temporarily shelved once Steven Spielberg made his pretty definitive Munich, the kind of movie that feels like a full stop on a subject, in 2005. The question hovering over the new film, which picked up a Best Original Screenplay nomination the other week, is why the idea has been returned to now, at this especially fraught moment in Israeli-Palestine relations, though the question mark is mitigated by an asterisk in the form of another question: when in the last 25 years hasn't there been a fraught moment in Israeli-Palestine relations? Director Tim Fehlbaum makes his primary concern the medium, not the message in revisiting the events Macdonald's film recapped, only from the notionally neutral perspective of the multinational TV crew providing ABC's coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics. We arrive at the crew's dingy HQ at the start of another night shift, with the aircon on the fritz (good, we suppose, for a few beads of forehead sweat later on), preliminaries in soccer, volleyball and boxing to keep an eye on, and a senior producer (Peter Sarsgaard) establishing an editorial line by asserting the Olympics is "not about politics, it's about emotions". The next 24 hours will, however, be hijacked - along with the Games and any coverage thereof - after representatives of the Palestinian militant group Black September storm the Olympic village, an action that resulted in the deaths of eleven Israeli coaches and athletes. This was one of those sorry days when sports became headline news.
For the most part, Fehlbaum's film operates in a milquetoast procedural mode, holing up inside the brick-and-mortar equivalent of an outside broadcast truck and watching onscreen director Geoff Mason (John Magaro) and producers Roone Arledge (Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) puzzle out first what's going on a block away, then the best angle on these events, what they can and can't show, and how best to keep the show on the road after local police storm the control room and demand they switch their cameras off. It's an odd, oblique, vaguely Sorkinesque set-up for what's surely meant to play as an involving thriller, falling closer to the experience of watching an on-the-hoof production or standards-and-practices meeting; the drama is interlaced with ABC's actual September 5 output, observed playing on the studio monitors, and showing anchorman Jim McKay - the American Des Lynam - stuttering and gulping through the single worst day of his decades-long career. It is, however, a set-up that generates a workmanlike metaphor for September 5's own making. What we're watching, for a dash over 90 minutes, are men of various nationalities shutting themselves away, rolling up their sleeves and furrowing their brows, and heading into one sombre meeting after another on the topic of how to cover an event - in the broader picture, world events after October 7, 2023 - without directly addressing the worst of it; how to film and report on an ever-mounting series of atrocities while simultaneously finding the right distance, a tasteful angle, the most apposite words, in the event there can ever be words. It's not a movie about the Middle East so much as it is a movie about the media's responses to the Middle East; the drama is largely confined to the booth, rarely venturing outside into the harsh sunlight of the outside world. It's always hermetic, consciously self-sealed, often a little stuffy.
That said, you wouldn't necessarily have to be Noam Chomsky to raise an eyebrow at the fact the story Hollywood has chosen to tell now - albeit outsourced to German producers - is one in which the Israelis were blameless martyrs; September 5 has played widely in the US this winter, where the more even-handed doc No Other Land (co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian, itself Oscar-nominated) has yet to secure theatrical distribution. Western media has grown comfortable with one point of view, and it would take a more forceful film than September 5 to usher us past any scepticism. The one we've got struck me as a product of that recent blurring of lines between the cinema and high-end cable television: a movie about TV that in many ways plays like the kind of illustrious TV movie that might have aired on HBO in the days before The Sopranos changed the subscription and programming model. Fehlbaum and his fellow writers insistently downplay the politics of the situation, instead honing in on period collars and hair, the intricacies of early Seventies technology (tape reels being rewound by hand to generate slowmotion effects, harried talk about satellite feeds, some taut business with a soldering iron) and internal conflict between ABC's sports and news divisions. To paraphrase Mark E. Smith, this is a film made with the highest German-American attention to the wrong detail - or at least to incidental detail, compelled and fascinated as it is by everything other than the identities and motives of the men in the athletes' village. (And even here, a hierarchy of sorts emerges: the Israeli athletes humanised with photographs and interviews with family members, the Palestinians never more than nameless faces on screens.) We're meant simply to admire the journalists' terse, unemotional professionalism, but September 5 also betrays the limitations of that professionalism: it's broadcasting on a narrow bandwidth, being both less informative than the Macdonald film (which didn't have to compress and streamline its facts to fit a thriller framework) and far less bold than the Spielberg film in what it says and shows. It does enough to sustain itself for an hour-and-a-half - one point in its favour: it retains a TV movie's economy - but a lot of it does feel like distraction, or at best circumlocution: a way of talking about the present without specifically talking about the present. Our movies - even our mainstream movies - used to be so much better and braver about this.
September 5 is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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