Orwell: 2+2=5
(USA, 119 min.)
Dir. Raoul Peck
Programme: Cannes Premiere (World premiere)
With his latest film, acclaimed filmmaker and former Haitian Minister of Culture Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found) has crafted an engaging, exhilarating, but slightly uneven essay film. Orwell dives deeply into the words and ideas of one of the 20th century’s most remarkable authors and sees how his near-prophetic words from decades ago resonate forcefully in today’s climate.
The film tells how that author, George Orwell, was born Eric Arthur Blair and raised in a family of relative privilege in the Bengal region of British India. As the author himself would later write, the colonies presented a unique opportunity for people on the lower end of the upper classes—families without land to hunt upon or only a few servants in their employ—to act as full-on gentlemen where labour was cheaper and land was more vast.
This division between races, classes, and capabilities fueled the man, even as he moved to Burma, then Oxfordshire, and then to the esteemed school Eton and beyond, each time entering a unique political and social ecosystem. Over the decades, he would find fascination with numerous themes considering the treatment of man by other men, resulting in such iconic works as Animal Farm. However, is his final novel, 1984, written towards the end of his life while battling tuberculosis, provides Peck’s film with its framework. The documentary details a totalitarian world where fake news abounds, the surveillance state is absolute, intimacies are regulated, and language and history are distorted for the betterment of the ruling powers.
While we hear the words of Orwell echo over the speakers, with his writing read aloud by actor Damian Lewis, images from places like Myanmar, Haiti, Gaza, and Ukraine buttress the argument that what once was old is new again, and maybe never was made old in the first place. Clips of George W. Bush decrying Iraq after the World Trade Center attacks, and Colin Powell’s famous obfuscation at the U.N. holding a tiny vial that represented the Anthrax supplies they were accused of having, provide resonant examples of state-sponsored mendacity that build to the current regime’s bigger and bigger lies.
Trump’s presidency is obviously included in the telling, but Peck doesn’t linger on him nor any other exemplar such as Russia’s Putin or Hungary’s Orban. While all are painted with the same rhetorical brush, it seems that Peck aims to show how the forces of totalitarian control have lingering effects, but also that their effectiveness is what makes them so dangerous. The central irony that one can democratically vote to end democracy is hinted at, a consequence of majority rule that goes back at least as far as Plato’s ruminations in The Republic, is teased but never fully explored.
In fact, much of the film feels more like an art installation about Orwell rather than a truly probing or insightful reconceptualization of the man and his ideas. For viewers totally unaware of his work outside the grand novels, there’s plenty here to appreciate, and as a stepping stone it’s beneficial to dive into the writing of this remarkable individual. But given the complexity of these ideas, the power and effects that the film draws upon, and the very easy way that Orwell’s admonishments can be misused out of context, there’s a level of care that, at times, seems absent from this telling.
One particularly egregious moment arrives late in the film when a series of texts are “translated” from the Newspeak jargon to dig to the “truthiness” beneath the words. “Police action,” “collateral damage,” and other appalling euphemisms are undercut with terms like “war,” or “civilian Casualties.” However, the listing of “anti-Semitism in 2024” being “translated” as “Protesting the actions of the Israeli state” is both provocative and appallingly simplistic, as evidenced by the gormless applause that erupted during the film’s premiere. Erasing subtlety and nuance in one instance in favour of another is an even more insidious form of Newspeak, one that wittingly or not, Peck himself is guilty of in this instance.
Peck’s next scene, quoting Orwell’s admonition about Sartre’s own misguided take on the subject and hinting at the greater (and lasting) evidence of Jew hatred, was met with silence by the crowd at Cannes. The deeper reflections were left dangling without truly getting into one of the most powerful aspects of Orwell’s writing at this period, inextricable from his texts on the ravages of a totalitarian state.
And this is one of the challenges of this piece. Peck touches upon very sophisticated ideas of great nuance and deeply philosophical ruminations by one of the greatest English writers of all time who managed to inject deeply provocative and profound elements in accessible and entertaining novels. While Orwell himself avoided the pitfalls of oversimplification and generalization, and was careful at every step to make clear the limits of what was being articulated and found other outlets for more carefully considered discussions, Peck’s own film smooths out many of edges and may, in fact, obfuscate subtleties more than it illuminates the chilling truths that it wishes to expose.
Peck’s ambition is admirable, and the film is certainly visually handsome. The clips are edited with a musical flow, and the quotes are carefully selected to match both historic and contemporary moments with great flourish. However, when all is said and done, the film feels like a half-translated version of Orwell and his ideas, especially since only some of the clips feel free from bias. Listing off the regular run of billionaire media barons while neglecting others is a choice, as are the decisions of what conflicts to highlight, which lies to admonish, and which regimes to reflect upon.
There’s a lot to admire about Orwell: 2+2=5, but despite its obvious craft, things simply don’t always add up. As a starting point, it will hopefully be beneficial to the remarkable legacy of the author and invite further exploration of his words and ideas. The film deserves to be seen, its ideas and qualities deserve to be debated, but it feels slight compared to the weight of its subject matter. It ironically obfuscates when it so clearly wishes to illuminate the power and the profound nature of Orwell and his writings.
