The descriptor “Orwellian” has lapsed into parody with regard to its modern usage. The right use it (incorrectly) as a crass way to describe how their freedoms are somehow being stifled. The left, meanwhile, have a more nuanced understanding of the ironies inherent in Orwell’s mode of political critique, but still don’t quite get things completely right. Director Raoul Peck, who has previously made films about great modern thinkers (James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro and Karl Marx in The Young Karl Marx), is here to straighten things out as he turns his lens to Orwell for this strangely unedifying essay work that documents the core concepts of Orwellian thinking while inelegantly matching the thinker’s ideas with modern history.
In doing so, it feels as if Peck himself is falling into the trap of seeing Orwell in just about every instance of geopolitical woe in the modern age, from the media “doublespeak” that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to Donald Trump’s technique of perma-gaslighting his slavish base. The filmmaker draws some arresting audiovisual cues into the patchwork of images, but the film lacks some of the goofy wit of British documentarian Adam Curtis, whose own provocative essays at least offer some element of surprise (even when they don’t work themselves).
