George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 are common to high school curricula. Generations of students across the country are familiar with phrases like “some [animals] are more equal than others” and “Big Brother is watching.” It does not take a Ph.D. in literature to recognize how public life is increasingly Orwellian, so the fundamental error in the new documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 is how it mistakes surface-level pattern recognition with insight.

Perhaps director Raoul Peck could not dig any deeper because the project is made with the cooperation of Orwell’s estate, and they have a reputation to preserve. The last time Peck tackled an author was with I Am Not Your Negro, an Oscar-nominated documentary about James Baldwin. There, he remixed Baldwin’s words into a sharp video essay about ra

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