“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.
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