Raoul Peck’s Dynamic George Orwell Doc

George Orwell himself has gone in and out of favor over the revisionist years, but the British author’s searing insights into empire and power and totalitarianism have never lost relevance. That’s particularly true of his final work, the dystopian premonition 1984. Published 76 years ago, the novel is the core of Raoul Peck’s documentary portrait of the writer. With a dynamic mix of biography and intellectual essence, and with the re-election of Donald Trump the obvious inflection point for its urgency, Orwell: 2+2=5 delves into the ways Orwell’s arguments illuminate a century’s worth of geopolitics.

Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story. The rich selection of archival material is punctuated by new footage, clips from a fascinating cross-section of documentaries and dramas, including several screen iterations of 1984 and Orwell’s novella Animal Farm, and outstanding graphics — notably a catalog of books that have been banned stateside and around the globe and a real-world Newspeak glossary that alone is worth the price of admission.

Well-chosen and delivered with plummy, intimate gravity by Damian Lewis, all the words heard in the film were written by Orwell, in letters, books and essays. His life story is smartly distilled to key moments of political awakening. His work as a police officer in British-occupied Burma (now Myanmar, and one of the places where Peck filmed new material) sparked a profound awareness of the “unjustifiable tyranny” of imperialism, and as a member of Britain’s “lower upper middle class,” he understood the impact on identity and personality of the social hierarchy.

The windswept Scottish island Jura is another of the places where Peck gathered footage, to poignant effect. It was there, in a remote farmhouse, that the widowed Orwell spent a significant portion of his final years, raising his young son and writing Nineteen-Eighty Four, as it was titled when published in June 1949, seven months before his death at 46 from tuberculosis.

Orwell’s comments in a letter about his wartime stint at the BBC tap into an ambivalence that no doubt is familiar to many journalists in today’s corporate media. “Don’t think I don’t see how they are using me,” he says. “But while here, I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.”

The interconnectivity of media and government is a central theme in Peck’s documentary, as it is in 1984, with the Ministry of Truth rewriting history by the hour and the language called Newspeak spinning webs of propaganda out of euphemisms. The helmer delivers a brilliant compendium of “prefabricated” terms and phrases, as Orwell called such verbiage, that have posed as political discourse over the decades, among them “peacekeeping operations,” “collateral damage,” “illegals,” “campaign finance,” “recession” and, in one of the film’s boldest swipes, “antisemitism 2024.”

And yet, in certain ways, the film doesn’t go as deep as Orwell’s observations; its choice of illustrative material generally hews to contemporary party lines, even while showcasing wise words that render such distinctions all but meaningless. “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy,” Orwell wrote, “and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”

A crucial lesson I draw from Orwell, and from a lifetime of political hope and despair, is that whichever half of the American duopoly is telling us why the latest chapter in our perpetual war is necessary, they’re almost certainly lying. Orwell’s warnings apply across the board, not just when obvious despots and lackeys let their fascist flags fly. It’s the filmmaker’s prerogative, of course, if he wants to preach to the anti-Trump choir, but the preaching shifts into hyperventilating in a questionable segue from scenes of public hangings of Nazis in 1946 Ukraine to the chaos of January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol.

Though it has its blind spots and isn’t as consistently potent as Peck’s 2016 doc on Baldwin, Orwell: 2+2=5 is a vital film. Eric Arthur Blair, who took the pen name George Orwell, was impelled to write by a keen awareness of injustice and a need to expose lies. Casting the author’s deathless words in a fresh light and gathering other dissident voices around him, Peck offers a sobering reminder of what’s at stake in this technology-defined age of doublethink and thoughtcrime, the world that Orwell foresaw and we occupy — and of how, for a long time now, we’ve been losing the plot.