If you’re a journalist with a healthy sense of self-importance, you’ll love September 5. This dad-friendly and Oscar-tipped new thriller about the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis makes a bunch of burly American sports reporters into heroes.
“I know it may not feel like it but you did a hell of a job today,” the head of ABC Sport (Peter Sarsgaard in serial-killer specs) reassures his rookie producer. The producer blinks back at him in quite reasonable disbelief. The crisis he’s been reporting has just ended in a shoot-out: 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and one West German police officer are dead. But not to worry – the plucky fellas at ABC did one hell of a job catching it all on camera. Up in the studio, they crack open the beers.
September 5 is a film so devoid of ethical complexity it’s almost fun to watch. We’re rooting for real life ABC man Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro) and his crew – all shiny foreheads, rolled-up sleeves and half-munched sandwiches – during an unusually tough day at the office. The Israelis and their captors serve as evocative wallpaper.
Journalism films give me the ick. They have an unsettled quality, a squelch of the fake. That’s because hacks make unnatural heroes: when the storyteller becomes the story, it tends to be at someone else’s expense. Take, for example, She Said, a 2019 book by two New York Times reporters about their investigation into sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein. The book makes clear that it was Weinstein’s victims who bore the risks (legal, financial, psychological) of the investigation. Inevitably, though, in the film adaptation it is the journalists who look badass, morally serious and bearing the true weight of the project. Not least because they’re played by film stars, in this case Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan.
The “morally indefensible” business, as Janet Malcolm memorably branded journalism, of grinding up other peoples’ lives and rearranging them into interesting shapes, however valid the reason, is an odd thing to glamourise. Making the journalist the hero of this process is even stranger.
Some of the greatest examples of the genre recognise this – think of Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a marital meltdown set in a newsroom that sizzles with self-interest and desire. But in recent years, the vibe has shifted towards the self-congratulatory. Some of the most admired modern journalism movies get away with this because the specific reporting they dramatise is unusually challenging and momentous. Take Tom McCarthy’s 2015 drama Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s dogged investigation into sexual abuse within the Catholic church, or Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, in which Washington Post editors risk prison to publish the Pentagon Papers.
The stories are legitimately worthy but they are told with a sense of unease. You can feel it in the lavish way the filmmakers slather on the corn syrup, as though to suppress their doubts with exaggerated certainty. Think of Tom Hanks’ Post editor growling, “If we don’t hold them accountable, who will?” Or Rachel McAdams’ Globe reporter earnestly assuring a sceptical source, “We’re gonna tell this story, we’re gonna tell it right.” It’s compulsory for at least one journalist to stand up and insist that what they’re doing is difficult, important, or brave. You have to wonder who they are trying to convince.
Occasionally, journalists do face frightening consequences for their work – as the real Post team did over the Pentagon Papers – but outside war zones, that’s rare. For the happy hacks of September 5, the perils of the hostage crisis are limited to a handful of technical puzzles, like how to roll a really big camera up a hill. These scenes have an Apollo 11 flavour: it’s problem solving on a deadline (“Don’t fuck it up, Geoff!), plus black coffee and snacks. And if in the midst of all the fast walking, yelling into phones and randomly marking red crosses on maps, the reality of the crisis gets a bit lost, don’t panic: ABC’s ratings are soaring. “More people have seen this than watched Armstrong land on the moon,” Sarsgaard’s character says, trying not to look pleased.
The ethical elasticity of the journalism genre also makes it vulnerable to hijacking by weird agendas. September 5 is the story of bluff, rough-edged, and reassuringly masculine American heroes asserting their good-guy-ness against a vague waft of Holocaust guilt. Director Tim Fehlbaum turns out not to be particularly interested in the hostage crisis, nor in the decades of violence surrounding the creation of Israel that led up to it, for which the US and its allies bear some responsibility. Instead, it seems to provide a neat opportunity for America to beat the Nazis all over again and perhaps even more convincingly this time. When the buffoonish West German police crash the ABC office waving their guns around, Sarsgaard gets to roar, “Get the fuck out of my studio!” How cathartic.
You can feel how much the film wants to end with a victory lap for hacks. Perhaps something like the scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom when a reporter inexplicably announces Osama bin Laden’s killing to a packed aeroplane, and somehow manages to take the credit. But annoyingly for the makers of September 5, at the 1972 Olympics it was the innocents who ended up dead. Fehlbaum has to make do with a moody final shot of Geoff slumped in his car, staring into space (possibly contemplating the emptiness of journalism films). At least he seems bothered about the bloodshed. Everyone else is still in the studio sinking beers.
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