The show must go on: "September 5"

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.

How it is: "Hard Truths"

First things first: let's welcome Mike Leigh back to the present day. It's been fifteen years since this filmmaker last engaged fully with contemporary British reality in making 2010's Another Year - a little less, if you count his Cultural Olympiad short A Running Jump - and maybe, having survived the 1980s once, Leigh felt he'd said everything he had to say about British life under a Conservative government. Instead, through the 2010s, Leigh took a step back into the past while expanding his palette: both 2014's Mr. Turner and 2018's Peterloo brought his signature, closely guarded improvisational methodology to bear on specific moments in national history. Now, however, it's 2025, the Tories have been toppled, and with Brexit proving the roaring success we were promised all along, it's hardly a surprise the characters in the director's latest, Hard Truths, are such radiant sunbeams, newly confident and upwardly mobile. I kid, of course. The new film, in which Leigh refines everything that was going on in 1993's savage Naked, 2002's baleful All or Nothing and 2008's comparatively perky Happy-Go-Lucky, scales back the cast-of-hundreds approach of those recent historical tableaux to focus in on a small handful of people - two family units - cowering in the wake of one colossal performance: that of Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy Deacon, a middle-aged malcontent mired in her own ever-mounting unhappiness. Initially, Pansy - who wakes from slumber with a scream, as if realising with horror that she's stuck in this form/country/life - seems terrified to leave the house she obsessively cleans, and that may not be a bad thing, given the reign of bolshy terror we see her unleashing on her fellow humans whenever she is coaxed out and about. It becomes positively understandable, even relatable, if we start to read Hard Truths (and that title's no lie) as some form of state-of-the-nation address.

We are, after all, back within touching distance of that old social realist standby, the kitchen sink. (During one family meal, the silences are made more awkward still by the sound of a sporadically dripping tap.) Leigh's eye for the humdrum yet revealing is as sharp as ever. Hard Truths is bookended by scenes in which Pansy's dumbstruck plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) removes first a radiator, then a bath from a client's house, a process I don't think I've seen in a movie before; when Pansy pauses her afternoon cleaning to unwind on the sofa, it's to watch one of those A Place in the Sun-type schedule fillers, rubbing in what she cannot afford and will likely never have. No wonder everyone's unhappy nowadays; and as the media drifts further off into fantasyland, intoxicating their audience with aspirational escapism, there's something both sobering and admirable about Leigh's stubborn allegiance to realism as a form. Some of the behaviour we'll be watching here has been heightened and accentuated, the better to fit the big screen, but a far higher percentage of Hard Truths suggests a ready cognisance of how life now is for a lot of British people. A central tenet of Leigh's method has been that the actors compile a list of folks they know, and crucially what they're like; that technique pays off here in extraordinary ways. 

For a while, you may fear - much as some worried about Johnny in Naked - that Pansy is going to be too much, so relentless is she in her axegrinding, yet even in the midst of her loudest wails of despair, she remains recognisable as a very British type: the person who is woefully unhappy about their life, yet so terrified of making even small changes to their narrow routine that all that anxious, negative energy gets projected outwards onto anybody unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. She's constantly being triggered; nothing's good enough or clean enough, and even the sight of a happy couple contemplating a sofa purchase serves to remind her of her own shortcomings. Some viewers have chosen to interpret this as another of the downcast Leigh's occasional self-portraits, altogether less flattering than Tim Spall's Turner - but, really, here but for the grace of God and a few lucky breaks go any of us. In the real world, such grousing can be funny to observe for a while, as indeed it is here; whether babies, dogs, close family or complete strangers, they all get it in the neck. Over the long haul, though, it's potentially exhausting and crushing. Though Pansy reacts to the presence of a fox in her back garden in much the same shrieking way a Sun reader might to just the idea of immigrants, it's not quite as simple as that she represents Brexit in human form. But she does feel like an embodiment of the many sicknesses and neuroses that have plagued this country in recent times: the isolationism and lack of long-term vision, the insecurity coupled to a hairtrigger temper, the constant lashing out. (And it's not even as if she's on social media.) Everything is everybody else's fault, because it's too painful to look inwards for long. A dentist, in passing, compliments Pansy on the cleanliness of her teeth, but it's the sharp end of our heroine's tongue she has to worry about, and there is no Mr. Muscle for the human heart; it takes an inordinate amount of scrubbing to remove the build-up of pain, disappointment and resentment, and good luck getting on a therapist's waiting list at this moment in time.

This was Leigh's final collaboration with the cinematographer Dick Pope before the latter's death last year, and after the dense period detail of Mr. Turner and Peterloo, Hard Truths marks a return to the look of those films the pair fashioned with TV money through the 1980s and 1990s. Leigh has never been one for undue adornment; he doesn't want anything to obscure these performances and what they represent. (The characters are multilayered, even if the worlds they inhabit are somewhat austere - or have fallen subject to austerity.) Yet the new film is properly widescreen - at one point catching five variably content folks seated side-by-side, like notes on a descending scale - and Leigh and Pope smartly use summer sunshine to offset the aggro, our sense there's a brouhaha waiting to happen in every car park and supermarket queue. We always feel this Britain - even this London - would be very pretty between May and September, if only we could keep the people out of sight. Every frame is similarly suffused with that wisdom born of careful observation. Pansy has a sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser and a people person, which gives the film somewhere else to go whenever its protagonist becomes unbearable: her household, with its two energised twentysomething daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown), is all colour, life, enthusiastic dishevelment. One of the girls slings her feet up on the sofa, which Pansy - endlessly berating her morose son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) - simply wouldn't tolerate. These cutaways at first seem a jolting break from the depressive norm - who are these healthily adjusted people, and what on earth are they doing in the same film/country/universe as a black cloud such as Pansy? - but they cast new light on our heroine's plight: Chantelle's clan have developed coping strategies - for setbacks in life, work and love - which the terse, uptight and eternally defensive Pansy hasn't. Visually, too, the contrast between the two households keeps the film lithe and lively: whenever we tire of seeing a woman hunkering down in a dismal rut, Leigh can cut to one of the girls on an afternoon run and keep things moving. What Leigh appears to have learnt from his recent experiences is the importance of flexibility, particularly as one gets older: looking beyond one's usual horizons, going out and meeting people, giving yourself a break. Hard Truths teaches by example, in this respect.

It would be easy to imagine a film directed by a grumpy middle-aged Mancunian, on the lives of Black British characters, which fell somewhere between a condescending and reactionary disaster. Instead, Hard Truths emerges as a triumph, for reasons that hinge on the difference between filmmaker and central character. A model of entrenchment, Pansy struggles to change - but Leigh has changed, or at least allowed himself the possibility of some wiggle room through close, attentive collaboration. We should credit casting supremo Nina Gold with furnishing the director with these excellent, largely unfamiliar actors, but it's Leigh who's finally allowed them their head and given them their due. To highlight one example among many: note how Pansy's syntax sporadically slips from aggrieved South Londoner into something more Caribbean; to pursue a hairdressing pun her jolly sister might appreciate, her roots keep showing. Leigh may just have had the character down as someone who's fallen victim to a very British depression, but Jean-Baptiste inhabits Pansy and subtly delineates a woman in the throes of a full-on identity crisis: one who wasn't given much encouragement in her formative years, spent the bulk of her life being drained of all hope and purpose, and now finds herself with nowhere to go but back to bed. (One measurable achievement here: we get all this information from spending fewer than 97 minutes in her company.) Pansy isn't entirely beyond recovery and rehabilitation: she'd be much in demand as a commercial cleaner, for one, and would even make a brilliant, wounding critic. But she is, like a lot of things about modern Britain, messed-up and deeply complicated: increasingly, watching her, we don't know whether to laugh or cry. (She doesn't, either, if a climactic outpouring is anything to go by.) She is at her most heartbreaking in the film's closing moments, where collectively Leigh and Jean-Baptiste show us how hard it is for some people to try and live a normal life, to exert some agency over that life, when the pressures from outside are so great and you have this much baggage weighing down on your back. But that's where we all are in 2025, and that's why Leigh ends the film as he does: with a sitdown standoff between two crumpled figures in a whole heap of pain. They could conceivably support one another, hold each other up; equally, though, they could never speak again. The present tense of a Leigh film has rarely felt more present, nor more urgent, as Hard Truths comes to underline the one question no senior British statesman has yet managed to convincingly answer: where the hell do we go from here?

Hard Truths is now playing in selected cinemas.