Since many of this year's Oscar nominees haven't yet been reviewed here at The Film Experience, I'll be going over a bunch of them in the coming weeks. Think of it as an AMPAS-minded sibling to Nick Taylor's series of Spirit Awards analysis. To start things off, let's go over the season's one lone screenplay nominee – Tim Fehlbaum's September 5. Once considered a threat for the Best Picture trophy by some major publications, the historical drama failed to meet pundits' expectations – its biggest miss was probably Editing. Today, it premiered on VOD, so it seems like a fitting time to consider the film…
Set during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, September 5 dramatizes its titular day from the perspective of an ABC Sports crew who was covering the Games when the Black September attack on members of the Israeli team took place. In the end, 17 people lost their lives – five Palestinian militants, eleven Israelis, and one West German police officer. Fehlbaum stages the action within the newsroom, focusing on the journalists' limited awareness of what the hell was happening even as they share the events with the world. Much noise is made about the need to be first, leading to rash decisions and incorrect reporting. Nevertheless, their work resulted in the first time such a happening was seen on live TV, one of the most viewed broadcasts in the medium's history.
Many have already questioned the film's making and release based on timing, how it reflects current events and exults a certain point-of-view on the current state of Israel-Palestine relations. However, just as many have dismissed such notions, leaning on the film's supposed apolitical nature. But is there anything more political than the attempt at being apolitical? Isn't that just a preservation of the status quo which, in itself, reflects a set of beliefs and systemic priorities? Moreover, doesn't an attempt to avoid the political dimensions of a politicized historical episode rob it of context, of purpose, even of its gravity? And does a depoliticized view of such happenings make sense as an artistic approach? Does it have inherent value past surface-level thrills?
You can probably already guess my answer to those questions, but even beyond matters of terrorism and Zionism and justice and whatnot, September 5's unwillingness to say anything about what it's depicting effectively neuters its potential as drama. Fehlbaum has whittled away at the Munich massacre's specificities to such a point it makes those lives directly impacted into a nebulous abstraction. Maybe this was an attempt at creating a blank slate of sorts, something that would reflect the audience's pre-existing beliefs to themselves with no manner of modulation or challenge in place. But that intentionality doesn't redeem the exercise. It's also cowardly to an unimaginable degree.
An outright propagandist take on this would be a tad revolting but would likely feel more valuable as art, dramaturgy, or anything. What we're left with is a journalistic drama whose depth is never more than theoretical. This comes, partly, as a consequence of the real-life characters whose preoccupation with exclusivity and breaking news surpassed more granular questions of ethics or media responsibility. September 5 can't work as a celebration of journalists because the journalists it depicts aren't really worth celebrating within this shallow milieu. Whatever self-criticism Fehlbaum writes into his Oscar-nominated original screenplay can only go so far until it smacks headfirst into the project's near-pathological lack of context and historical reflection.
This has handicapped a game cast of such talented actors as Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch. They do their best to glean personhood out of textually underdeveloped characterizations, but the very structure of September 5 is working against them. It's never more evident than when Benesch's German translator exits the newsroom to report directly from the airport. What could have been a storyline worth pursuing becomes another victim of the boiler room premise, another abstraction that can only enter the narrative in fragmentary spurts. Hansjörg Weißbrich's cutting has been praised to high heavens, but it only exacerbates these problems while appealing to thriller sensibilities that cheapen the whole project. At least Markus Förderer's lensing has a palpable POV in its grainy ugliness, murky colors, and desiccated skin tones, doing some arresting things with the story's claustrophobic parameters. However, it's never enough.
September 5 is available to rent from the Microsoft Store and Spectrum On Demand.