Review: 'Orwell: 2+2=5" recounts the life of the "1984" author, and shows how his descriptions of totalitarianism still hold true
In his latest documentary, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” filmmaker Raoul Peck does for the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984” what he did for James Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro”: He transcends the mere recitation of the events of the writer’s life to analyze the writer’s work and how it resonates in today’s world.
With Orwell, who dissected the effects of totalitarian societies and described them with laser-like precision, the parallels between what was written in the 1940s and what’s happening today are frighteningly prescient.
The biographical information is compelling in itself. Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a journalist and activist — he espoused democratic socialism — who was born in 1903 in India, at the height of British imperialism. At 19, he began serving in the Indian Imperial Police in another part of the empire, what was then called Burma.
There, he witnessed first-hand the brutality and absurdity of his people subjugating another on the flimsy excuse that they thought themselves better because of their skin color and class status.
Blair became a journalist, eager to report on these class divisions and the efforts to dismantle them. This led him to go to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War — where he became disillusioned with Soviet-style Communism, which he came to believe was no less brutal and authoritarian than the Nazi-backed Spanish regime.
Peck uses Blair/Orwell’s actual words, read by the British actor Damian Lewis, to illustrate the author’s points but also to fill in moments of his life — through letters and diaries. Some of those entries were written on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, where Orwell wrote his masterpiece, “1984,” and in sanatoriums, where Orwell was treated for the tuberculosis that took his life in 1950, at age 46.
Peck uses movie adaptations of “Animal Farm” and particularly of “1984” to illustrate the book’s points. When the protagonist, Winston Smith, is shown four fingers and told it’s actually five, the movie shows us Edmond O’Brien in a 1956 version being tortured for saying there are four fingers. (The documentary also uses clips from a 1954 British TV movie starring Peter Cushing, and director Michael Radford’s adaptation, released in the actual year 1984, with John Hurt as Smith and Richard Burton as his torturer.)
It’s in the dissection of the themes of “1984,” and their applications to today’s world, where Peck’s movie burns brightest. It starts with the way Orwell described the malleable nature of language, and how regimes have always twisted words to hide their crimes. A recent example was in 2022, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin called the invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.”
Peck doesn’t spare countries we in the West may like more. He also cites Orwellian doublespeak within propaganda from China, Sudan, Israel and the United States (e.g., George W. Bush’s orders to invade Iraq).
The point Peck makes is that Orwell would have recognized much of what’s going on, particularly in the United States right now, because he saw it coming — if not in these specific details, at least in the broad contours.
Peck tabulates the censorship both around the world (the Soviets banned “Animal Farm” for being anti-Communist) and in the United States. One list that scrolls on the screen shows book bans in U.S. states from 2022 to 2023 — and my home state of Utah pops up, for books by Elana K. Arnold and Margaret Atwood. (The list is so long that in the time it’s displayed in the film, it only gets through the authors whose names start with “A.”)
Censorship, like rewriting history (cue the footage of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol), is of a piece of the totalitarianism playbook, Orwell said. “From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned,” he wrote.
Any time Lewis reads a quote from Orwell’s writing, an image from the evening news pops into one’s head. The scariest observation Orwell made in “1984” is the idea that “no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” It’s almost 80 years since Orwell wrote that, and Peck’s “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a reminder of how it’s just as true now — and will become more true unless the people speak up, march and vote.
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‘Orwell: 2+2=5’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some violent content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 119 minutes.