September 5

“September 5” takes place almost exclusively inside an ABC Sports television control room on the eponymous day in 1972 at the Munich Summer Olympics when armed Palestinians took the Israeli contingent hostage. Seen predominantly from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), overnight head of the control room, as he and his cohorts are forced to spontaneously adapt, the real-time sensation and fly on the wall aesthetic lend the feel of a docudrama. Indeed, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decrees that their job to “put the camera in the right place and...follow the story as it unfolds in real time. News can tell us what it means after it’s over.” In that way, “September 5” is less about the conflict than the coverage of it, the movie’s apolitical nature intertwined with its taut narrative, constant questions of what to show and what not to show, what to say and what not to say, often posed by the head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin*). This is effective in so far as it goes but the limited perspective also means the larger idea of the broadcast establishing a dangerous precedent by transforming something grave into spectacle never fully resonates. To his credit, Magaro at least lets that knowledge flood his character at the end, of a new world the characters have all unwittingly entered, one that will have to be made a sense of in a movie called “September 6.”

*I was fortunate enough to see Ben Chaplin in 2018 at The Old Vic in London in Mood Music and my foremost takeaway was wondering why movies could not harness the kind of electricity he emanated on the stage. “September 5” does.