Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort bound to exasperate people across the political spectrum. Even so, Raoul Peck’s repeated usage of the author’s words to buttress his own hazily presented view of current events makes this a less rigorous and engaging work than anything about Orwell should be.
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The film proceeds along multiple tracks. Some are more gripping than the others, but Peck’s flowing collage style—drawing heavily on adaptations of “1984” and “Animal Farm”—creates throughout a smoothly hypnotic effect in the style of Adam Curtis. The primary framing device is composed of Orwell’s writing and letters from the end of his life, when he was fighting tuberculosis and finishing his last novel, “1984,” on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Peck uses Jura’s rocky green primeval beauty as a stark backdrop for Orwell’s correspondence about anxiety over the book and his declining health. This is dramatically underlined by audio of a person wheezing to catch their breath. Peck uses this in the film’s last stretches to draw a somewhat facile connection to a specific modern tragedy whose relevance is not readily apparent.
This recurring section includes snippets from Orwell’s essays on his upbringing, changing views on politics, and stern declamations about the dangers of propaganda. Peck presents a short precis of Orwell’s life, enlivened by the author’s sardonic and yet incisive portrayal of his very specific “lower upper middle class” upbringing. (Like many great British writers, Orwell had a jeweler’s eye for the class distinctions the country forced on its people.) Unsurprisingly, given the interest Peck’s work, like “Exterminate All the Brutes,” showed in colonialism, he moves quickly to Orwell’s formative years as a young British imperial police officer in Burma. Orwell’s close personal experience with empire and lacerating honesty over having been “part of the actual machinery of despotism” is illuminating and used as an effective bridge to his later focus on anti-totalitarianism both in life (fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War) and art (writing “1984,” still the defining fictional work on twentieth-century authoritarian systems).
The most attention-catching parts of “Orwell: 2+2=5” will likely be Peck’s montages that run Orwell’s narration over an onslaught of current affairs imagery. In straining for relevance and drawing too broadly from Orwell’s writings, Peck muddies up the narrative. Orwell’s denunciations of propaganda and the undermining of truth generated by politicized language were specific and taken from life. Though supporting the war against the Nazis, he was so revolted by producing wartime broadcasts at the BBC that he left, wryly complimenting himself by saying he “kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting.” Comparisons can clearly be drawn from Orwell’s time to the current day about how mass media can shape popular opinion, particularly demonizing foreigners. However, simply running footage showing current conflicts or authoritarians giving speeches, generally without context, does little to illustrate Orwell’s arguments about the power of language.
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Some of the writer’s statements of intent that Peck includes are wisely drawn from Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” which is not just about the craft of his profession but his dedication to truth-telling. It is asking too much to insist that a documentary about a genius needs to match the subject’s level of skill or courage. Still, when Peck uses Orwell’s line “I knew I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,” it becomes difficult not to notice the film’s failure to live up to the second half of that phrase. While many will take issue with the political figures and movements Peck sets his sights on, there is very little in “Orwell: 2+2=5” that is likely to cause a viewer to face an uncomfortable truth.
Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, “Orwell: 2+2=5” remains valuable. Peck’s genuine admiration for the sharpness and clarity of Orwell’s writing, combined with the rich tonality of Damian Lewis’ narration, gives the author as grandly respectful a presentation as “I Am Not Your Negro” did for James Baldwin. If “Orwell: 2+2=5” gets one more person to discover Orwell’s work for themselves, then its job will have been accomplished. [B]
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