– Critic’s Pick –
by Manohla Dargis | New York Times | October 2, 2025
His novel “1984” captured the tactics of totalitarianism back in 1949. A startling new documentary from Raoul Peck looks at Orwell’s life.
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, a year after the end of the World War II. That line appears early in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” an essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.
Peck plucked that observation about art and politics from Orwell’s essential 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he lists “four great motives for writing” — especially for writing prose and, of course, aside from earning a living — including “political purpose.” Near the end of the essay, Orwell writes that he hopes to start a new book. What soon followed was “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the seismic novel that helped turned his name into an adjective. Anchored by Orwell’s writing — and Damian Lewis’s calm, intimate voice-over — Peck charts the writer’s life in tandem with world-shattering events, focusing on when he was working on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published in 1949. Months later, Orwell was dead.
The documentary, which Peck made in collaboration with the Orwell Estate, begins in 1946, when Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) traveled to Jura, a remote island in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. It was there, as some text announces, that he began working on his next and final novel. The Orwell biographer D.J. Taylor has written that the idea for “Nineteen Eighty-Four” came to him earlier and seems to have been inspired by a 1943 strategy meeting with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin where they discussed plans to “parcel up” the postwar world. Orwell was interested in the idea of the world being carved into so-called zones of interest, as well as the implications of totalitarianism.
Shortly after the documentary opens, the camera is soaring high over the vividly green expanse of Jura, and Peck is effectively aligning his own sympathies with Orwell’s. “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” you hear Lewis say, channeling Orwell. It’s yet another line from “Why I Write” and, I think, could serve as an artistic statement from Peck, who was born in Haiti and whose family fled the Duvalier dictatorship when he was just a child. His highly regarded, politically bold filmography deserves a wider audience and includes fiction (“The Young Karl Marx”) and other documentaries (“Lumumba: Death of a Prophet,” about Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what became known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.)
“Orwell” covers enough biographical information to ground you in his life, and shortly after the opener, Peck begins discursively tracking his subject from cradle to grave. In outline, it is a life that begins in British India, where Orwell was born into “the lower upper-middle class,” as the voice-over dryly puts it. It continues in Britain, where he attended school, as well as in British-controlled Burma (now Myanmar), where he worked as a police officer, which meant that he was “part of the actual machinery of despotism.” Although Peck folds in other details and milestones — including the death of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen Blair — the director isn’t solely interested in the usual biographical basics. Peck is undeniably intrigued by Orwell the man, but always in relation to the world that he harrowingly diagnosed.
Peck’s dynamic approach to his subject finds him putting the personal and the political into play through a dizzying amount of found and original material. This includes a wealth of archival sources, including family photos, newsreels, diaristic entries, drawings and numerous excerpts from other films, including Michael Radford’s “1984,” a suitably grim adaptation starring John Hurt as the haunted Winston Smith. Almost from the start, Peck also incorporates more recent material, including of world leaders and conflagrations. At one point, he dramatically juxtaposes a 2002 clip of George W. Bush speaking about Iraq and “a grave threat to peace” with one of people in Radford’s “1984,” gathered together watching a TV screen, as a voice announces: “We’re at war with the people of Eurasia.”
The sheer volume of material that Peck has gathered together can be almost overwhelming, and at times, his reach threatens to dilute the movie’s argument as he skips across time and space, jumping from one theme, war zone and trauma to another, including Gaza and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the most crucial images, though, is a 1903 photo of the tiny, pale baby Orwell in the arms of his dark-skinned Indian nursemaid. “I do not think one can access a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development” the voice-over states, again citing “Why I Write.” “His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in,” the voice continues as Peck holds on this photo, Orwell’s powerful words speaking as much to his own life as to this documentary and its righteously engaged director.
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