George Orwell in the documentary film Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5.Elevation Pictures
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
Directed by Raoul Peck
Classification N/A; 119 minutes
Now playing in select theatres
After last year’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, documentary veteran Raoul Peck returns with another sociopolitical exploration of history and its relation to the present. His focus this time, with the aptly titled Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, is the historical reverberations of the life and work of English writer George Orwell.
For Peck, fascism through the ages is the lens through which he presents the work of Orwell, beginning with the novelist’s birth in Motihari, India, in 1903, where he was tended to by an unnamed Indian nursemaid. It’s a biographical and archival detail that bookends the film, underscoring Peck’s quotation of Orwell himself: “To abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.”
Segmented using titles sourced from 1984‘s doublethink – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, Peck’s political vision here is much like that of his previous work: staunchly anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, as well as ever conscious of the further striating quality of identifiers such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion and class.
Utilizing a selection of Orwell’s writing alongside biographical details of his life (for example, his political radicalization after his role in the British Army’s occupation of Burma), narrated by English actor Damien Lewis, Peck traces a kaleidoscopic web of totalitarianism through time, from British colonial rule to America under President Donald Trump – the latter, alongside Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, forming a particularly impactful example of the way authoritarianism utilizes the twin forces of language and capital to undermine objective truth.
It’s a dizzying tour of the acts by allied states to oppress their most vulnerable, with Peck sourcing footage from the past five years in particular as an act of both witnessing and emphasizing the urgency of such events. Peck is, if anything, determined to cast our gaze back to the stark realities and hypocrisies of our current world order.
A still from Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5.Elevation Pictures
Likewise punctuated by a slurry of cinematic references, including, of course, most screen adaptations of Orwell’s work, as well as politically lockstep films such as Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and the work of Ken Loach – hell, there’s even a reference to the viral horror flick M3GAN in Peck’s closing chapter.
Peck also uses artificial intelligence to bolster his meta commentary on the loss of truth in our political present – a creative decision that feels off in tone, even if clear in intent, given the vision of the film.
Despite its unevenness at times, Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 is a sprawling work that offers itself as a frightening historical record. Indeed, it is perhaps the most soberingly didactic of Peck’s works, offering a crash course in fascism’s multiple lives, means and methods throughout the past century.
Special to The Globe and Mail