Day: May 19, 2025

Raoul Peck is one of our most valuable documentary filmmakers. Instead of just presenting us with information, he shows us ways of seeing, inspiring us to look for patterns and connections we might not have seen otherwise. That’s the principle at work in his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. You can know George Orwell’s work backward and forward and still find something new in Peck’s film; or you can be an Orwell neophyte and understand why, 75 years after his death, his ideas and preoccupations feel more modern than ever. At certain points in the 20th century, dystopian novels like Animal Farm and 1984 may have seemed unnecessarily alarmist, cautionary tales but not necessarily foregone conclusions about our future. In 2025, they read like nonfiction. In these books, and in the witty, joyously precise essays he wrote during his lifetime, Orwell worried in advance about the lives we’re living today. Orwell: 2+2=5 makes the case for why we should be worrying, too.

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Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, a kind of imagined reconstruction of the ambitious historical work James Baldwin was just starting to write when he died, in 1987, is one of the finest documentaries of this century so far, a mini-history of Black racial identity in America from the mid- to late 20th century. With Orwell: 2+2=5, Peck returns to a similar idea: sometimes a writer’s final work—the last thing they leave behind, even if they’d hoped to accomplish more—can become an unwittingly definitive statement. Orwell: 2+2=5 begins with the beginning of an end: in 1946, the writer born with the name Eric Arthur Blair retreated to the unruly and beautiful Scottish island of Jura, where he would write what would become his final completed book. 1984 is the story of a dutiful average citizen in a futuristic society, Winston Smith, who goes about the tasks of his job (rewriting history according to the whims of his country’s totalitarian government) even as he harbors secret dreams of rebellion. That makes him, in just one of the many unnervingly prescient terms Orwell coined for the book, a “thought-criminal,” which leads to his capture and brutal re-education.

The novel was published in 1949, the year before Orwell would succumb to tuberculosis, which he’d contracted as he was writing the book. Orwell: 2+2=5—its title derived from a mathematical falsehood that wasn’t invented by Orwell, but which he used as an example of how humans can be programmed to believe that a lie is the truth—both tells the story of Orwell’s last years and makes the case for his work as a weapon against the malicious forces seeking to undermine our autonomy as thinking human beings. Intricate and multi-layered, it covers a lot of territory in a runtime of roughly two hours; you might feel yourself racing to keep up with it.

But that’s what makes Peck’s work in general, and this documentary in particular, so exhilarating. To say Orwell’s language feels modern isn’t exactly right—few writers of today are as clear or defiantly direct—but his ideas hit as if he’d formulated them only yesterday. Excerpts from his books and essays—read by Damien Lewis—float over news clips showing streets reduced to rubble after 2003’s Battle of Basra in Iraq, or capturing the anguish of man grieving over a child’s body in 2023 Gaza. Just as we’re processing a characteristically observant Orwell sentence like “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country,” a sly clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq flashes before us. Peck is a master at matching words with images. His thinking is sophisticated, but never abstract. He covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, outlining the biographical details of Orwell’s life, including the time he spent as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the early 1920s, an experience that drastically shaped his later political beliefs. (He came to loathe himself for having been “part of the actual machinery of despotism.”) There are clips from movies and television, too, and not just the two film adaptations of 1984 (the first being Michael Anderson’s 1956 version, followed by Michael Radford’s in 1984). We get snippets of David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist and Sydney Pollack’s 1985 Out of Africa: Peck helps us understand, in dots and dashes, the world Orwell came from; amazingly, he makes the complexities of class politics in Great Britain almost easy to understand.

But most of all, Peck is blazingly forthright in his championing of Orwell as a man from the past who may just hold the key to the world’s future. You might think that’s too tall an order for any human—but that’s only if you haven’t read Orwell. He was clever and fun, as well as serious-minded—exactly the opposite of dull and instructive. And he understood better than any other 20th century English-speaking writer how language could be used to confuse and corrupt. In the pages of 1984 he served up slogans so fiendishly distinctive that you’d have to be brain-dead to miss the warnings wrapped up in them. Peck shares some of them with us here: “Freedom is slavery.” “War is peace.” These jangly contradictions, presented as truths, are designed to rattle and rewire our brains; just think how easily a corrupt authoritarian leader could put them to use, and how readily a not-thinking public could fall right in line. Peck doesn’t spell that out for us—he doesn’t have to. Orwell: 2+2=5 feels like the boldest documentary anyone could make right now. Another slogan from 1984: “Ignorance is strength.” If you don’t feel that one in your gut right now, you’re sleepwalking through life.