September 5 Is Almost Nauseatingly Suspenseful

Peter Sarsgaard captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment. Photo: Paramount Pictures

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event. The violent standoff at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which saw the Palestinian terror group Black September take a group of Israeli athletes hostage — an incident that resulted in the shocking deaths of all the captives and most of the captors — has been well documented on film, most notably in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 2005 drama Munich. Fehlbaum returns to the event via its on-the-ground transmission: the ABC sports team that, while providing round-the-clock live coverage of the Olympics that year, suddenly found itself in one of the biggest, most dramatic news events of its time.

This approach is filled with potential pitfalls. At heart it’s kind of an underdog story, about sports guys, chroniclers of the frivolous, punching above their weight when given the opportunity. Make it too much of one, however, and you undermine the deadly gravity of the situation. At one point, network headquarters suggests to ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) that they let the news team handle this one, and he refuses; his guys found the story, they have access to the satellite link, and they’re the ones on the ground. Sarsgaard, who gave his greatest performance more than two decades ago in another true-life journalism drama, Shattered Glass, once again captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment as the situation demands. You can imagine this guy, with those seemingly kind eyes that also look like they could slice right through you, leading a newsroom. (The actor, who won the Volpi Cup at Venice last year for Memory, probably deserves a bit more recognition these days as one of the best we’ve got.)

The movie stays largely within the confines of ABC’s remote studio in Munich, which Fehlbaum and his crew have scrupulously re-created, reportedly down to the tiniest details. Its dark, cramped corridors and control rooms absorb the sinister mood of the events happening outside; every decision begins to feel like a life-and-death matter, even though in many of these cases it’s just journalists and technicians pressing buttons and saying words. Much of the suspense derives from the ways that the studio crew, led by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), figures out how to cover the unfolding story, from tapping into radio frequencies being used by the police to dressing up a crew member as an athlete so he can smuggle canisters of film in and out of the now-cordoned-off Olympic Village. At 94 minutes, the film races by, but it also demonstrates a patience and fascination with the process — with the whirr of tape reels, the tangle of cables, the lumbering weight of cameras — that enhances the tension. By focusing so intently on this particular group of people covering this broader event, Fehlbaum finds his way into an otherwise pre-determined drama. We know what happened at Munich, yet we find ourselves living through the events as if their outcome was unwritten.

The film also takes on the quality of a conjuring. Fehlbaum has also remained ruthlessly faithful to the facts, interweaving acres of real, contemporaneous television footage with this modern-day reconstruction, so that his actors are interacting with actual images from the era. When they talk to the legendary sportscaster Jim McKay, we’re seeing the actual McKay (who died in 2008) as if he were responding in real time; when an Israeli athlete who got away from the kidnappers comes into the studio for an interview, we’re seeing the real guy. That may not sound like such a dramatic aesthetic gambit, but the incorporation is so thorough, so constant, that the movie starts to feel like a conversation with the past. Which it is: We forget, perhaps, that the presence of Israeli athletes at Munich was a big deal in 1972, just a generation and a half removed from World War II, in a landscape where the shadow of the Holocaust still loomed large.

Of course, September 5 comes at a time when it’s bound to become part of another conversation, about what’s currently happening in Palestine. The film serves as an important reminder that civilians have died on both sides of this conflict for decades — that nobody anywhere, really, has a monopoly on the murder of innocents. And while September 5 was filmed before the events of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent attack on the Gaza Strip and beyond, the filmmakers didn’t walk into this guilelessly; the struggle in the Middle East might sometimes exit the news cycle, especially in the U.S., but it’s been an ongoing debacle for most of our lifetimes.

The hermetically sealed quality of Fehlbaum’s film perhaps prevents us from reading too much into it about contemporary politics — or maybe it invites us to read whatever we want. But of course, such a framing can itself reveal the real-time political machinery of a historical event. Within this heated environment, we see how attitudes and language become codified. At one point, there’s even an internal conversation about whether to refer to the Black September captors as “terrorists.� We know how that one turned out. September 5 reminds us — as did Munich, as does No Other Land, for that matter — that it’s the drip, drip, drip of small, seemingly minor decisions and actions that wind up determining how we see, experience, and understand history.