For a post-war Germany literally split between East and West, between the Soviet Union on one side and the U.S.-allied West on the other, the 1972 Munich Olympics gave the West German government the opportunity to present their best selves less than thirty years after the Second World War.
West Germany spared no expense in building out the facilities for international athletes, but the top-down decision to limit security measures as means to show West Germans in their best, pro-democracy, anti-fascist light, proved not just a costly one, but a fatal one for the Israeli athletes and their coaches, held hostage by Black September, a militant Palestinian organization, over 17 fateful hours beginning in the early morning hours of September 5.
For Israel, the hostage-taking and murder of its athletes and coaches led to a decades-spanning, legally, ethically, and morally controversial hunt for the purported perpetrators and planners wherever the Israelis could find them. For West Germany, the Munich massacre, as it came to be called, led to a complete overhaul of their security apparatus and preparedness for hostage situations and terrorist activity, homegrown and otherwise. Much of the former has been extensively chronicled via other media, primarily documentaries and most famously, Steven Spielberg's 2005 dramatic thriller, Munich.
For ABC News, specifically members of the sports division sent to Germany to cover the 1972 Olympics, the hostage crisis and its aftermath unfolded just a few hundred yards from their cramped German facility, forcing an unprepared, inexperienced team to cover potentially world-changing events. Until now, that part of the story has remained untold in any form or format, giving co-writer and director Tim Fehlbaum (Tides, Hell), the perfect opportunity to fill in the background details, real-life characters (integral and not), and the on-the-fly decision-making, constrained by both time and limited information, via September 5, a narrowly focused docudrama that doubles as a well-crafted, efficiently paced, standout suspense-thriller.
While Peter Sarsgaard (Memory, The Lost Daughter, An Education) receives top billing as Roone Arledge, the boss of ABC Sports from 1968 through 1986, September 5 finds its center in Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro, Past Lives), a relatively new sports producer thrust into leading the coverage of the hostage crisis purely by circumstance: he's handling night shift duties when initially unsubstantiated reports arrive on his desk of shots fired in the nearby Olympic village.
As a non-German speaking American, Mason relies heavily on Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch, The Teacher's Lounge), a German interpreter-translator assigned to the Olympics news team. In Fehlbaum's fictionalized retelling, Marianne plays a crucial, even central role in communicating rapidly shifting developments to and from Mason and ABC crew.
As Arledge navigates local politics, the sports-hard news divide, and limited satellite time mostly offscreen, Mason faces a series of moral and ethical quandaries, beginning with the fraught decision to show live footage, potentially beaming out the murders of the Israeli athletes to the world or later, exposing the German government's bumbling attempts to stage a counter-terrorism operation with zero training or experience (a disaster from any perspective), and reporting on the backgrounds and fates of the Israeli athletes and coaches held hostage by Black September.
Buoyed by a tight, economical screenplay and Sarsgaard, Magaro, and Benesch's lived-in performances, September 5 benefits from a uniformly strong cast, including Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader, the ABC crew's lone Jewish member and a necessary voice of caution, Zinedine Soualem as Jacques Lesgards, a half-French, half-Algerian member of the studio crew sidestepping the casual anti-Arab racism of the time, and countless others who fill in roles with limited screen-time, but leave notable impressions, nonetheless.
The deliberate decision, however, to keep the action focused almost exclusively inside the studio, mediating the events outside via unedited scraps of film, video monitors, and archival footage (much of it cleverly integrated into the film) leaves September 5 dependent on audiences to study up beforehand on the events depicted on film, including their background and context, or experience a frustrating sense of incompleteness as they watch the film through the end credits (homework presumably to follow).
Depending on your perspective, It's a decision some audience members will applaud due to the complexity involved. Others, however, will have the opposite reaction. Both reactions will be equally understandable.
September 5 opens Friday, December 13, in select movie theaters throughout North America, on Friday, December 13, followed by a wide release on Friday, January 17. Visit the official site for more information.