Orwell 2+2=5

Saturday March 14 @ 1:30 pm

Documentary / Biography / History
2 hr – PG – Released 2025

George Orwell’s searing insights into empire and power and totalitarianism have never lost relevance. That’s particularly true of his final work, the dystopian premonition 1984. Published 76 years ago, the novel is the core of Raoul Peck’s documentary portrait of the writer. With a dynamic mix of biography and intellectual essence, and with the re-election of Donald Trump the obvious inflection point for its urgency, Orwell: 2+2=5 delves into the ways Orwell’s arguments illuminate a century’s worth of geopolitics.

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.

Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story. The rich selection of archival material is punctuated by new footage, clips from a fascinating cross-section of documentaries and dramas, including several screen iterations of 1984 and Orwell’s novella Animal Farm, and outstanding graphics — notably a catalog of books that have been banned stateside and around the globe and a real-world Newspeak glossary that alone is worth the price of admission.

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. 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.

Well-chosen and delivered with plummy, intimate gravity by Damian Lewis, all the words heard in the film were written by Orwell, in letters, books and essays. His life story is smartly distilled to key moments of political awakening. His work as a police officer in British-occupied Burma (now Myanmar, and one of the places where Peck filmed new material) sparked a profound awareness of the “unjustifiable tyranny” of imperialism, and as a member of Britain’s “lower upper middle class,” he understood the impact on identity and personality of the social hierarchy.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is a vital film. Eric Arthur Blair, who took the pen name George Orwell, was impelled to write by a keen awareness of injustice and a need to expose lies. Casting the author’s deathless words in a fresh light and gathering other dissident voices around him, Peck offers a sobering reminder of what’s at stake in this technology-defined age of doublethink and thoughtcrime, the world that Orwell foresaw and we occupy — and of how, for a long time now, we’ve been losing the plot.