John Magaro – Movie Musings

Well-made reconstruction of a seminal moment, that avoids all the awkward questions it raises

Director: Tim Fehlbaum

Cast: Peter Sarsgaard (Roone Arledge), John Magaro (Geoffrey Mason), Ben Chaplin (Marvin Bader), Leonie Benesch (Marianne Gebhardt), Zinedine Soualem (Jacques Lesgards), Georgina Rich (Gladys Deist), Corey Johnson (Hank Hanson), Marcus Rutherford (Carter Jeffrey), Daniel Adeosun (Gary Slaughter), Benjamin Walker (Peter Jennings)

There is only one thing we really remember about the 1972 Munich Olympics. This celebration of sport, meant to mark Germany’s re-emergence from the shadow of the Holocaust, saw 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team taken hostage and murdered by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group. The entire kidnapping played out on international TV, the inadequacy of the German police response cripplingly obvious to millions of viewers around the world. September 5 focuses on the ABC Sports team that switched from covering Mark Spitz to one of the first primetime terrorist acts.

Journalists in films tend to either be heroic strivers after truth or scum-bag bin-searchers. September 5 is very much in the first camp, chronicling with documentary precision the professionalism and dedication involved in bringing this story to the world. The story is as terribly involving as the dreadful events it covers on fuzzy long-distance footage. But September 5 struggles when it tries to capture why it’s telling a story that has already been expertly told before (not least in Kevin MacDonald’s superb Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September). What point is September 5 trying to make, either about media or terrorism? It’s not clear to me.

Fehlbaum’s film is as expertly assembled as the swiftly cut-together sports action the team excelled at. The production and sound design faultlessly bring to life the atmosphere of a claustrophobic TV control room. It has a loving eye for the detail of how 70s television was made – you’ve got to admire the practical details of how live coverage was water-marked, clunky cameras were wheeled into position, squabbles were carried out over limited satellite windows and on-the-hoof re-wiring was made to hook up journalists on phones for live broadcast. A parade of strong actors deliver clipped professionalism and anxious strain – Sarsgaard, Magaro, Chaplin and Benesch are all great.

But it fumbles when it addresses the moral issues. Fundamentally, September 5 doesn’t know how to handle the complex ethical balance journalism straddles, between covering events like this and giving the terrorists exactly what they want. After all, as it’s pointed out, there’s a reason Black September targeted the most public event in the world (and why they made demands they surely knew Israel would never accept). They wanted mass coverage: and ABC gave it to them. By September 6, the whole world knew what Palestine was: it’s striking how many of the ABC crew are unfamiliar not only with the sort of fundamentals even a child today knows about the Middle East conflict but how some of them even have to double-check what exactly the word “terrorism” means.

On top of that, the extended media coverage, in some ways, even helped the terrorists. Not least their ability to switch on the TVs in their captured rooms in the Olympic Village and watch live footage of the Munich police’s ham-fisted preparations to storm the building. There is chilling realisation in the control room that the terrorists are also watching their coverage, but the debate about what to do in response to this is light. In fact, much of the conclusion is that the inept German police (who eventually burst into the control room, pointing machine guns wildly, demanding the feed is cut) are really to blame since they forgot to cut the building’s power.

Either way, September 5 doesn’t question the fact that the ABC team encouraged journalist Peter Jennings to remain hidden in the village so he could carry on phoning in live updates, or that they forged an ID for a junior member of the team so could pass as a US athlete and smuggle camera footage in and out of the park. Or that they tune into a police scanner to follow and report on the Munich police’s plans. It also skirts questions of ratings – a clear motivation to keep the cameras rolling – and how this meant ABC had an awkward intention overlap with Black September.

There is no question though that the crew care deeply about the athlete’s fate. Ben Chaplin’s character (an American Jew, who lost family in the Holocaust) goes farthest in constantly reminding the team they are covering the fates of real people here, urging restraint in the coverage. September 5 skirts overt commentary on the Middle East, but raises interesting questions over the characters’ (all of them old enough to remember World War Two) perceptions of Germany and the lingering guilt of that nation (very well captured by Leonie Benesch’s awkward translator).

But when given (false) confirmation that the attempt to free the hostages at the airport has succeeded, it’s the temptation of a scoop that sends the news out on the air. (This moment of mistaken celebration allows September 5 to squeeze in its moments of congratulation for the team’s excellent job before the tragic ending.) Sure, the characters look sickened when they realise their mistake – but does the fact they were given false information really matter more than the fact their motivation was because they wanted to break the story first?

September 5 never really explores these moral questions. It settles for stating them – as Benesch’s character does, describing how she and other reporters hustled at the airport for a scoop, while people literally died a few kms away. It ends with a confusing series of captions, stating this was the first time a terrorist attack was broadcast live and 900 million people watched. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the 900 million figure is being used to celebrate the coverage, rather than reflecting on the fact it taught terrorist groups large scale actions capture attention.

September 5 is on the brink of making a more interesting point, that this was a turning point where getting the story out was more important than the implications of telling the story: that transmitting sensitive information or being too quick to broadcast major headlines was the first stride on a slippery slope that led to the generally awful state of the media today. It’s not a point September 5 is interested in making.

Don’t get me wrong. The Black September attack was an atrocity and ABC’s coverage of its was expert journalism. But you can also argue it shows how journalists can disconnect what they are doing from its real-world impact. But September 5 is silent on how Black September’s success in turning their cause into international news. Or that, thanks it changed the playbooks of terrorist organisations all over the world. None of these interesting, but challenging, ideas get any airtime in this well-made reconstruction.

Lost opportunities and the path not taken carries real emotional force in this fabulous debut

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee (Nora), Teo Yoo (Hae Sung), John Magaro (Arthur), Seung Ah Moon (Young Nora), Seung Min Yim (Young Hae Sung), Ji Hye Yoon (Nora’s mum), Min Young Ahn (Hae Sung’s mum)

Few things carry such mystique and indestructible promise as the paths not taken. We can invest choices we didn’t make with overpowering possibilities. In them, every moment can be perfect, every outcome joyful, every conclusion perfect. But when we look back at who we were when we made those choices, our past lives can feel like exactly that: other lives of different people. The passions, desires and dreams of those people can feel completely foreign to us today, while at the same time carrying a strong nostalgic pull.

The mystique of the past is a key theme in Celine Song’s debut. Partially inspired by events in her own life, Past Lives covers 24 years in the lives of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Ted Yoo). Childhood sweethearts in Seoul in the late 90s, Nora migrates to Canada with her family and the two lose touch, reconnecting in their early 20s. Nora is now a writer-in-training in New York, Hae Sung an engineering student in Seoul. Communicating by Skype, they recapture some of their closeness but never meet in person before Nora cuts off contact to focus on her writing career. Twelve years later, Nora is a playwright married to novelist Arthur (John Magaro), living in the East Side of New York, when Hae Sung visits the city, looking for he-knows-not-what from Nora, who is herself torn between the pull of her past, the happiness of her present and her plans for future.

Past Lives is a romance devoid of contact, features no words of love and built on unspoken feelings and distance (a distance that covers metres in person, continents online and years in understanding). Gentle, poetic and full of lingering moments, it’s wistful and quietly involving. In many ways very little happens, but everything is at stake for all of the film’s characters and their future happiness. Song gives the dialogue a poetic naturalness, but also knows when silence speaks volumes. It’s particularly striking that nearly half the film – and 24 years – pass by before Nora and Hae Sung actually meet in person and the extent to which they recognise the differences between who they are and who they were is one of Song’s central themes.

Nora is key to this. Beautifully played by Greta Lee, she is a mix of unspoken desires and determined ambition, focused and driven but with a deep vein of romantic nostalgia in her. An immigrant who has moved from Seoul to Toronto to New York, she has a career in English but (as her husband tells her) dreams in Korean. She is also a woman who has effectively remade herself at several junctures: from the child who dreams of the Nobel Prize, to the trainee writer who wishes to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, to the playwright cracking Broadway. She moves forward at every point.

This contrasts sharply with Hae Sung. Ted Yoo is wonderful as this quiet, polite, romantic soul whose ambitions are simpler and desires more homespun. He’s the sensitive boy reduced to sullen, hurt silence when Nora leaves for Canada. He supports his parents, forms friendships for life (he has a core group of three university friends who remain his closest friends 12 years later – they are, by the way, a wonderful portrait of male supportiveness) and remains unspokenly devoted to Nora all his life. While she can compartmentalise him away for a decade, it’s clear her image stays with him every day, the pain of that tearful goodbye over Skype lingering through his future relationships.

He arrives in New York to see if there may be something there, to see if in-person those long-distance Skype calls (at dawn in New York and dusk in Seoul) can turn into something real. It relates to a Korean idea of In-Yun – that over several lives, an invisible force can bring people together by destiny. In-Yun is what Nora and Hae Sung both wonder may join them together: play-dates in a park in Seoul, Skype calls in their twenties, walks along the banks of the East River in their thirties. These are like different lives, but yet they keep returning to each other. Could this mean they are meant to be together? Or could this all just be groundwork for a future life to come?

The characters don’t know. Perhaps they will never know. But as Nora and Hae Sung stroll through New York – surrounded by canoodling couples at every turn – it’s hard to escape the pull of that possibility. It’s recognised by Nora’s husband Arthur, a difficult part well-played by John Maguro. In many ways, Arthur is patience embodied. Arthur, who recognises that part of the groundwork of their marriage is the pragmatism of Nora needing a green card, doesn’t complain. He sits quietly (admittedly with flashes of pain in his eyes) while they chat in Korean at a bar and makes every effort to be welcoming. But the obvious bond makes him ask, does he have the same bond with Nora? Could he affect her life, the way Hae Sung has – and the way Nora has affected his own. In a bedroom chat, he playfully (but with a tinge of passive aggressiveness) suggests she might be happier with Hae Sung. Maybe Arthur sees a lot of himself in Hae Sung – it’s not a stretch to imagine Arthur flying halfway around the world on the off-chance of a date with Nora.

If Past Lives has a fault, it is that it doesn’t do enough of really using this relationship-that-never-was as a way to delve into the immigrant experience. Nora has a passing wistfulness for Seoul and Korean culture, but Song relies a little too much on Nora bluntly telling us this. Any sense of conflict, between the pull of these two cultural heritages doesn’t really come to life in the film. Past Lives doesn’t really delve into the alienation and lack of understanding Nora now has for parts of her Korean culture – for instance she is stunned to hear Hae Sung lives with his parents and about his sense of financial obligation before marriage, but the film treats these as more personal eccentricities rather than insights into a cultural divide that has grown up.

Past Lives though builds – in a year that feels very French New Wave and inspired by Richard Linklater – into a masterful single-shot sequence that plays out a fateful wait for a taxi in real time that carries devastating emotional force, where every possible outcome guarantees pain. It uses the slightly awkward, self-conscious distance between two people who never touch but want to, to extraordinary effect and creates an atmosphere replete with longing, sadness and inevitability. With superb performances from the three leads – who are all in turns both wonderfully patient and desperately needy – it’s a simple but universal tale that grows rich in the telling.