Curious George: "Orwell: 2+2=5"

In an era of blandly streaming hagiography, the veteran Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has developed the distinguishing skill of using noted lives and known properties as a platform for addressing bigger, more pressing issues. 2017's I Am Not Your Negro stitched James Baldwin's words and public appearances into an engrossing, provocative disquisition on race in America; his brilliant 2021 series for HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes, reordered the history books and emerged with a jolting exposé of the colonialist mindset. On one level, Peck's new project Orwell: 2+2=5 is telling a very specific story: that of George Orwell, heading to the Scottish island of Jura in 1948, after the death of his wife, to recover from a recent brush with tuberculosis and begin work on the novel that was to become Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet Peck - restless, curious, adventurous, mischievous - isn't content to leave it at that. You get the feeling this is something different - something radical, indeed - from this patchwork film's first ten minutes. We get clips of TV movie retellings of Orwell's life (expected) and film adaptations of his work (very expected), but also from Lean's Oliver Twist (less so); while newsreel footage of the bombing of Berlin in 1945 (expected) is juxtaposed with the siege of Mariupol, police raids in Burma, the hangings undertaken by the Nazis in Sergei Loznitza's 2021 doc Babi Yar. Context, and the noose some doofus wielded amid the January 6 riots. It's headscrambling at first, but a unifying idea soon becomes apparent: 1948 equals 1984 equals 2026. To that old canard it couldn't happen here, Peck - via Orwell - retorts it already has, and likely will again, if we're not careful. This is not, as it turns out, solely a film about Orwell, but a film on the themes (or a film extending the themes) Orwell was putting into play.

Biographically, Peck frames his subject as an inside man, a well-bred whistleblower. Born into what the writer specified as the "lower-upper middle class", Orwell was shuttled off to Eton in his youth before joining the police force in colonial Burma. As Peck sees it - and Orwell, in his personal notes, recognised - this background left him uniquely positioned to expose the mechanisms of power whereby lies become truth, war peace, ignorance strength, slavery freedom. Peck has possibly been encouraged by producer Alex Gibney to cover this ground from multiple angles, clutching (and combining) disparate sources. In a sequence on bookburning, Peck crosscuts footage from Nazi Germany, recent US book bans, the Ramin Bahrani-directed remake of Fahrenheit 451 and some extraordinary footage of an IDF soldier torching a library in Gaza. One thing you probably weren't expecting to see in a documentary about George Orwell: a clip from 2023's M3GAN, used to illustrate both the threat posed by AI and the writer's dire warnings about mass surveillance. Big Brother continues to watch us all, even if his aim is to convert our words and likeness into deindividualised, saleable slop. I sensed Peck was really onto something when he cut in a lengthy extract from the still-contentious collectivism debate at the centre of Ken Loach's Land and Freedom - but then, this is a film of ideas rather than mere textbook or shrine: Peck clearly regards Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard or open-ended text, an ongoing warning from history. The ideas thrown loose by all this montage are chewy, jolting, provocative, as they were when Orwell first set them on the page; in Peck's hands, they also become an argument for reading and viewing widely and critically. (Not least because they propose a corrective to the narrow-minded monocultures that nurture and prop up fascism.) I understand where those who've found the film scattershot are coming from: Orwell himself gets a little lost in the mix, though in Damian Lewis's reading, he presents as far funnier than expected. (On Sartre: "He is a bag of wind.") Orwell: 2+2=5 is what happens when an estate affords a filmmaker free hand to run with an author's ideas; rather than a supplicant creative paying mealymouthed tribute to a great, active mind, it finds a great, active mind meeting a great, active mind head on so as to thrash something out and create a multiplication of meanings. The result, well worth grappling with, is at once a superlative feat of editing, the film equivalent of Orwell's goal "to write in plain, vigorous language", and a weapon to be wielded against the worst aspects of the modern world. Arm yourself.

Orwell: 2+2=5 opens today in selected cinemas.