By John Corrado
Director Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less biography of George Orwell, and more heavily slanted video essay that struggles to thread the needle between the British author’s work and selected modern events. It’s a major disappointment.
The film’s title, of course, is a reference to Orwell’s most famous book 1984, and how “Newspeak” enforced by Big Brother required people to throw out basic facts if they didn’t fit the government’s agenda. The idea being that disinformation and compelled speech is used by totalitarian regime’s to destabilize society.
Actor Damien Lewis gives voice to Orwell through narration, and the film’s best stuff is when focusing purely on the author’s life, his own writing, and final days suffering from tuberculosis that took his life at the age of 46. Throughout it all we get ample footage from the 1956 and 1984 film adaptations of 1984. But Peck is more interested in his own ideas trying to connect Orwell’s writing to the current moment. The film is messy and rambling, tackling the rise of disinformation in America, but also modern wars and international conflicts.
At two hours, Peck’s film feels at once overstuffed and incomplete. Peck’s main thesis is that we are living in Orwell’s 1984. In his attempt to prove this, he bombards us with recent news footage; from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza war, the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the January 6th riots, etc. But Peck loses the plot early on, so much so that he just starts using clips from Ken Loach films to try to prove his point.
Peck’s film is often heavy-handed, and also comes from the Michael Moore school of selective, manipulative editing. Early on, he cuts between images of a bombed out Germany during World War II, and images of cities flattened during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What is Peck trying to say? That the allies bombing Germany to stop the Nazis is in any conceivable way morally equivalent to Putin’s illegal invasion of a sovereign nation?
Peck doesn’t hide his left-wing bias (we get glowing clips of Bernie Sanders and AOC, despite them doing more to mainstream the socialist ideologies that Orwell so eloquently warned about in Animal Farm than any other modern politicians). Therefore, there is no real engagement with why Orwell is also popular on the right, or modern phenomenons like cancel culture that are also fuelled by a form of Newspeak.
The terrible use of AI-generated images also greatly undercuts Peck’s point. But the worst sin that Peck commits comes late in the game. Through a list of words flashing onscreen that he claims now have double meaning, he redefines “antisemitism” as, essentially, a word weaponized to not allow criticism of Israel. Right in front of our eyes, Peck is doing what Orwell warned about, and changing the definition of a word to fit his own agenda.
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