The film, which premiered on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, gives us passages from the author’s essays and diaries read by Damian Lewis and shown over bucolic aerial shots of the Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell wrote his classic 1948 novel about a future society in which the government, personified as an all-powerful Big Brother, freely lies to its citizens and creates false enemies to direct their anger toward the other. In those juxtapositions and others, “Orwell: 2+2=5” lets the author’s words detail the dangers of “the organized lying practiced by totalitarian states” and the “disbelief in the very existence of objective truths” that Orwell identified and current regimes practice today. Because about half an hour into “Orwell: 2+2=5,” Peck drops in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters: the mock gallows to hang Vice President Mike Pence, the enraged protestors breaking into Congress and assaulting guards and police officers, and then Trump’s own Big Brotherly description about that day: “The love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Author: Steve Pond
Published at: 2025-05-17 21:35:33
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