Filmmaker Raoul Peck uses George Orwell’s writings to weave together a biographical portrait of the author and a dispiriting picture of power and truth in the modern world in “Orwell: 2+2=5.”
He’s hardly the first to connect the dots between Orwell’s prophetic writings and the current state of things — remember, sales for “Nineteen Eighty-Four” soared in the months following Donald Trump’s first election when phrases like “alternative facts” were being used with no irony. Knowing that, Peck draws heavily on what has come before. The film is packed with clips from film adaptations of “1984,” including Michael Anderson’s black and white version from 1956, and Michael Radford’s, released in 1984, documentaries, like Robert Kane Pappas’s 2003 warning “Orwell Rolls in His Grave,” and news footage from World War II through Gaza. In sum, it makes a persuasive point that things are only getting worse.
“Orwell: 2+2=5” is loosely structured around Orwell’s time on the Isle of Jura, in Scotland, where he wrote what would be his last novel, “1984,” while his health was deteriorating from tuberculosis. He went to Jura in 1946 and was dead by 1950. But this is no Wikipedia page or college lecture. There are no talking heads and no one explaining, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Instead, it’s a loose assembly of biography, reflection and key moments of political awakening, with actor Damian Lewis narrating Orwell’s words with a poetic gravitas, interspersed with a collage of images, words and archival footage. Anything from David Lean’s “Oliver Twist” and Sydney Pollack “Out of Africa” to Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth” is on the table, and nothing is there carelessly. Alexei Aigui’s powerful score adds a melancholy weight to sequences showing wartime destruction past and present along with the political phrases used to describe them: A “strategic bombing” in Berlin in 1945, “peacekeeping operations” in Mariupol in 2022, “clearance operation” in Myanmar in 2017.
There’s a purposefully disorienting effect to the film’s editing, blending past, present, fiction and reality in such a way that it all begins to blur together. By the time we’re hearing Lewis utter Orwell’s famous phrase “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” while AI images pollute the screen, it’s easy to forget that the quote is seven decades old. It won’t prepare you for any kind of historical report on Orwell, totalitarianism or doublespeak, but its impact is undeniable.
Orwell understood that every writer is a product of their own time. Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bihar, then an outpost of the British Empire, Peck focuses in on a photograph of him as a baby with his Indian nursemaid. Describing himself as “lower upper middle class,” Orwell attended Eton and served with the British Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar) and observed how power manifested in colonial outposts, how class unattainable in England was suddenly accessible to any white man simply because they were white. He considered himself both a snob and a revolutionary, which only intensified as he picked up more life experiences through the Spanish Civil War, his time at the BBC and simply observing ordinary people around him. It’s actually quite extraordinary just how much information Peck, who has delved into the lives of James Baldwin, Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba and Ernest Cole, is able to convey in just under two hours.
“Orwell: 2+2=5” might not be as fully realized as Peck’s 2017 knockout “I Am Not Your Negro,” but it is no less essential. It hardly matters that Orwell is on every high schooler’s syllabus, that doublespeak and big brother are household phrases, or that every few years there is some film, some book, some article reminding us of his big ideas. Earlier this year Andy Serkis even debuted a new animated version of “Animal Farm” at a film festival.
Orwell died months after “1984” was released and wouldn’t know just how prophetic his work would become. While every writer dreams of their words, their thoughts living on, wouldn’t it be nice if, for a moment, these weren’t so awfully relevant?
“Orwell: 2+2=5,” a Neon release in select theaters Friday, has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 119 minutes. Three stars out of four.
