ORWELL: 2 + 2 = 5 (Raoul Peck 20250

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RAOUL PECK: ORWELL: 2 + 2 = 5 (2025)

Ruminating about George Orwell's current significance

Not Peck's best work, this is a sketch portrait of the great English essayist George Orwell (Eric Blair) used to ruminate on the evils of totalitarianism, the perils for our future, and the virtues of democratic socialism. There is a big emphasis on Orwell's most famous long work the dystopian novel 1984 (the equally popular short one is of course Animal Farm). 1984 imagines a super-grim totalitarian future, and is famous for giving us catchwords like "doublethink," "newspeak," "thought police," "Big Brother," and "unperson," which have become part of the language. It would seem that we are sometimes obviously, sometimes imperceptibly, losing the freedom and clarity we once may have had, though the undermining of western democracy appears more subtle. In a notable clip here Edward Snowden worries that people may just take no notice of his revelations about the growth of massive US government surveillance.

Peck tells his somewhat meandeering story with a mishmash of clips and hushed (and also loud) voiceovers (by Damian Lewis who played Henry VIII in the excellent series "Wolf Hall") whose very purpose is unclear at times. Is this a political treatise? Is it an essay on Orwell? Or is it mainly interested in 1984? For much of the way, I wasn't sure.

Peck takes up various concerns of Orwell, including the predation of the Brithsh Empire on its colonies. A concern implicit in many of his works is disinformation, and Peck relates this to the apparent justifications by world leaders of ethnic cleansing, and how AI bodes ill for an informed electorate.

This film makes free use of two of the film adaptations of 1984 which don't fit very well together, also splicing in factoids about Orwell's life. The end result was to make me want to leave off watching the film to simply reread the book and compare the 1956 ad 1984 films, all of which seem more interesting than Peck's film. So is Orwell's life. The subtitle (if that is what it is), "2 + 2 = 5" draws attention to a central point of Orwell's novel, that a totalitarian regime distorts facts to suit its own interests and subjugate its victims. This is no doubt a central concern of Peck also, highly relevant in today's world of increasing misinformation, disinformation, and an American would-be dictator who speaks of "fake news" but constantly lies himself. Toward the end of the film, Peck lists some "newspeak"-like terms with their "real" meanings, such as: "special military operation = invasion of Ukraine," "vocational training center = concentration camp," "pacifrication = elimination of unreliable elements," "legal use of force = police brutality," "illegals = refugees," and, my favorite, "antisemitism = weaponized term to silence critics of Israeli military action" - though one could avoid the jargon of "weaponized" and just say "excuse to repress a pro-Palestine stand." Peck adds a quote from a letter where Orwell announces the plan to write a pan of Jean-Paul Sartre's then-new book Anti-Semite and Jew and says "The less talk there is about 'the Jew' or 'the anti-Semite' as a species of animal different from ourselves the better."

These are interesting but scarcely related points. Peck never quite has me with him most of the way through this film as he skips along on his nonlinear journey through Orwell's life, from the early upbringing (but skipping the key four years at Eton, and key attachments) and the development of his political awareness and anti-colonialist feelings to the writing of what became his last book on the island of Jura while suffering from the worsening of the tuberculosis that would kill him a few years later, famous at last but with his life cut short. (Peck uses tuberculosis bacilli as a visual motif.)

Orwell was born in the far east and went back to it. He spent time in North Africa and wrote a book in Marrakesh. He had interesting experiences of poverty and travel and the Spanish Civil War that led to important books, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, and did an immense amount of other writing. Nonetheless a few Hemingway types apart, writers write, their living goes into their books, and their lives are less interesting tnan their works. I feel that the clips from the two films ask us to confuse 1984's protagonist Winston Smith, as played by Edmond O'Brien and John Hurt, with versions of George Orwell himself. It seems all very impressionistic and arbitrary. And not enlightening. What do we learn from this melange?

RogerEbert.com reviewer Monica Castillo seems to agree, commenting that this film f"eels unfinished," with some of its ideas feeling "sprinkled into Orwell’s life story, creating a disjointed feeling..."

Read the novel 1984 instead, along with Animal Farm and Orwell's other great books. Read also a bio of the man (even the Wikipedia article is interesting, if only a start). Learn about the writer's formative years at Eton, when Cyril Connolly was his friend when they were taught French by Aldous Huxley. Classmates at Eton with Orwell, if I've got my dates right, included John Strachey, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton, Oliver Messel, Brian Howard, and the novelists Anthony Powell and Henry Green. Though they didn't all know each other, this was a happy and much more important period for Orwell than his preceding time at the boarding/preparatory school St. Cyprian's that he delights so much in complaining of in his long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys." Watch the film adaptations of the 1984. You don't need to watch this film unless you are a Raoul Peck completist.

Orwell 2 + 2 = 5, 119 mins., premiered at Cannes, showing at a number of other festivals, including Sydney, Toronto, Rio and London BFI. It opened in the US Oct. 3 (IFC Center) and comes to the West Coast Oct. 10. Metacritic rating: 74%.