For about half an hour or so, Raoul Peck’s documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5” is amazingly restrained in the way it deals with author George Orwell, his seminal dystopian novel “1984” and its connections to today’s world. The film, which premiered on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, gives us passages from the author’s essays and diaries read by Damian Lewis and shown over bucolic aerial shots of the Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell wrote his classic 1948 novel about a future society in which the government, personified as an all-powerful Big Brother, freely lies to its citizens and creates false enemies to direct their anger toward the other.
There are scenes from the many film adaptations of “1984,” from other movies and from news and historical footage to show that parts of Orwell’s playbook are in use today, detailing actions in Myanmar, Ukraine, the Philippines, Russia and Hungary, among other hotspots of oppression. It then brings things to the North American continent by talking about how George W. Bush rallied the country (and some of the world) behind the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq with false information. (It’s pretty uncanny when you place his speech alongside Big Brother’s explanation of why the fictional superstate of Oceania needs to be at war with Eurasia.)
In those juxtapositions and others, “Orwell: 2+2=5” lets the author’s words detail the dangers of “the organized lying practiced by totalitarian states” and the “disbelief in the very existence of objective truths” that Orwell identified and current regimes practice today. But for most of the film’s first half hour, it doesn’t mention the current U.S. president at all. Could Peck, the Haitian filmmaker whose other documentaries include “I Am Not Your Negro” and “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” really be following the lead of other media outlets who have seemingly given up on going after the second Donald Trump presidency?
Hell, no. He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t. Because about half an hour into “Orwell: 2+2=5,” Peck drops in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters: the mock gallows to hang Vice President Mike Pence, the enraged protestors breaking into Congress and assaulting guards and police officers, and then Trump’s own Big Brotherly description about that day: “The love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
With that sequence, Peck drags Donald Trump into the world of “1984,” and finds that the president is a very good fit for a fictional society in which one of the three main slogans is “Ignorance Is Strength.” (The other two are “War Is Peace” and “Freedom Is Slavery.”)
The rest of the movie is far too nuanced to be a simple polemic against the Trump administration, but there’s a reason why Peck pulled “Orwell” out of Sundance and delayed its release until Cannes: because he kept finding things that needed to be said about ties between Orwell’s work and the current U.S.A.
That means that the right wing won’t pay attention to Peck’s film, or will put the award-winning filmmaker on the ugly/untalented list alongside Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and whoever gets on their leader’s bad side this week. And it means some naysayers will dismiss the whole thing on the grounds that Orwell was an artist, and artists shouldn’t venture into politics.
Then again, Orwell had answers for both of those complains more than 80 years ago: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” he wrote at one point, along with the observation that in some societies, “atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in based solely on political proclivities.”
“Orwell: 2+2=5” is an artful balancing act, one that dips in and out of Orwell’s life and work, but also uses a broad array of reference points as it swings from history to art to the most current of events. The film is an essay, not a biography, and it feels placid and measured, because of the way Orwell wrote and the way his words are read by Lewis. But as it details the use of the “1984” playbook in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Honduras, El Salvador, Palestine and countless other places, there’s inescapable anger driving even the most subdued sequences.
And that anger is aimed not just at despots and tyrants, but at profiteers and enablers. Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Elon Musk and others make the dishonor list, and dismissed in a line Orwell wrote about their midcentury predecessors: “They are simply parasites, of less use to society as fleas are to a dog.”
In its two-hour running time, Peck also ventures into the threats of AI and the surveillance society and the rise of the far right and anti-immigrant sentiment around the world. As it wanders further away from Orwell, “Orwell” threatens at times to becomes sprawling and unfocused, though most of the time it remains heady, dense and even playful.
And even if it’s not easy to find its way back to Orwell after a while, the author was always more of a jumping-off point than a true subject. “Orwell: 2+2=5” is less about Orwell than it is about us, and it’s less about “1984” than it is about 2025.
The post ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ Review: Angry Documentary Is as Much About Us (and Donald Trump) as About George Orwell appeared first on TheWrap.