Nineteen Eighty-Four

Blu-ray Review

Distributor: The Criterion Collection

Release date: July 23, 2019

MSRP: $39.95

Amazon price: $27.99

The Film

Michael Radford’s 1984 film of George Orwell’s horrifyingly prophetic classic is easier to respect than to love. It’s scrupulously faithful to the brilliant novel, but in bringing the story to life onscreen, it demonstrates that an intricate and gripping plot is not the overriding element of the book.

An Ingsoc party official gives a rousing propaganda speech. (Criterion/MGM)

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in the hellscape of Oceania, a dystopian Britain existing decades after a far-left socialist revolution brought the Ingsoc party (short for English Socialism, which the film unfortunately does not explain) to absolute power.

The country exists in a state of perpetual war with either Eurasia (once the Soviet Union) or Eastasia (once China). When alliances shift, and a former ally becomes an opponent, the official media simply speaks as if the opponent has been the same since time immemorial, and the populace eagerly parrots back the lie.

The opening of the film is a brilliantly horrifying demonstration of Orwell’s famous Two Minutes Hate, a political ritual in which the population is made to purge themselves by communally viewing a brief propaganda video each day. They are encouraged to watch reverentially at first, as Oceania’s noble workers and soldiers are shown, but then to scream and jeer and shout as footage of their enemies appears.

Ingsoc party members scream at a giant television during the daily Two Minutes Hate. (Criterion/MGM)

It’s truly sickening to see something that, much like 1976’s Network, was seen as nightmarish, broad satire when it was filmed, but feels like simple reality today. The novel and film each do an exquisite job of putting society under a microscope and examining how it has allowed itself to degrade into bestial lunacy.

We meet Winston (John Hurt), a party functionary who works in the ominously named Ministry of Truth. Orwell understood that in dictatorships, the most horrible places have names that are the bland antithesis of their function. Winston’s job is reviewing old newspapers and altering inconvenient articles to align with the current party orthodoxy. He is literally in charge of rewriting history.

When the government decides to reduce the population’s sugar ration from 30 grams to 25 grams per week, for example, Winston must create new articles saying that the ration has, in fact, been raised, from 20 grams to 25 grams. They can do this because the entire population lives in a frenzied state of enthusiasm for whatever the party says, knowing that they will be shot if their ardor abates for even an instant.

Winston soon meets Julia (Suzanna Hamilton), a mysterious young woman who gently guides him into an illicit affair. Sex and love have been banned in this world, where the erasure of individuality is the goal. In one scene, a party official gives a lecture on how the orgasm will be eradicated and all babies will be created through artificial insemination. The party wants to “render obsolete the family unit, until it becomes impossible to conceptualize.”

Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) and Winston (John Hurt). (Criterion/MGM)

Indeed, the party’s overall goal is to constrict the ability of people to even have thoughts against it – what it terms “Thought Crime.” They are systematically deleting words from the English language, to create a new language called Newspeak. A friend of Winston’s is working on the 10^th edition of the Newspeak dictionary, and he’s excited that they are cleansing the language.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not about any sort of organized resistance efforts that Winston or Julia undertake, they both know that would be futile. Their illicit sex is its own act of resistance. As Winston tells Julia at one point, “it’s not so much staying alive as staying human that’s important.”

Winston is also fascinatingly haunted by nightmarish visions of his mother. As a child, in the aftermath of the unnamed war that brought Ingsoc to power, he stole a chocolate bar from his little sister, while she was in their mother’s arms. He ran off and ate it, only to find they had abandoned him to his fate when he went back to their rat-infested flat.

Orwell was a socialist, but he had the audacity to make his own side the villains. He clearly saw the evils of Stalinism, which many on his side blinded themselves to, and he saw the inherent appetite for power in all people.

A massive television broadcasts Winston’s confession in a complex effects shot that was created entirely in-camera. (Criterion/MGM)

Many of the details in the book and film are borrowed from Stalin’s Soviet Union. For example, “Enemies of the State” who are caught are forced to record obsequious public confessions, in which they beg forgiveness for a laundry list of crimes they never committed. Throughout Radford’s film, these confessions are forever broadcast in the background of scenes, part of the fabric of everyday life.

It’s also fascinating that Orwell was wise enough to know a totalitarian society like this could never control the entire population. Instead, the film makes clear that there is an “inner party,” consisting of the elite, like the mysterious O’Brien (Richard Burton), who live in opulence and have access to luxuries unimaginable elsewhere.

There is a much larger “outer party,” consisting of a vast portion of the population, like Winston and Julia. They live amidst endless war, beset by shortages that leave them on starvation rations, and are constantly watched by the Thought Police. They are sustained only by their fervent belief in Ingsoc.

Winston (John Hurt) hides in a corner of his miserable apartment to write in his diary, while the television broadcasts a confession. (Criterion/MGM)

Finally, there are the “Proles,” an equally vast portion of the population who live free from the political restrictions of the party members, but in ignorant squalor, as laborer drones.

The film also elegantly conveys the way in which the children of Oceania have been brainwashed. All the film’s youngsters appear in Hitler Youth-like uniforms, usually singing hideous propaganda songs about how eager they are to die for the cause. One girl even turns her own father in to the Thought Police.

There’s also a skillfully conceived element of news broadcasts that constantly play in the background of scenes from the omnipresent televisions. Only inner party members are able to turn their televisions off, as Winston is shocked to learn in one visit to O’Brien’s lavish penthouse.

Winston (John Hurt) visits O’Brien (Richard Burton) in his luxurious apartment. (Criterion/MGM)

The news blares constant agricultural and industrial statistics, which are always positive, always an increase over last month or last year. Orwell imagined this in 1948, but it became common in the Soviet satellite republics after World War II, as shown in scenes in the brilliant film The Lives of Others, set in 1980s East Germany.

One of the film’s most distinctive elements is its retro-futuristic design. Radford explains in an interview on the disc that because the book was written in 1948, he decided not to make his film look like a current vision of the future. Instead, he wanted it to be a 1948 vision of the future. The technology is both antiquated and fantastical, every element of the design is brimming with imagination. It is quite similar to Terry Gilliam’s classic Brazil, an homage to Orwell’s novel that was filming concurrently in the UK that year.

If it sounds like this review is mostly focusing on thematic elements, and not story, it’s because the actual narrative is minimal and vague. We get a great deal of detail about Winston’s psychology and his motivations, but he never really does much of anything, except have his brief affair with Julia. A conventional film narrative would have him much more active, decisive and in control.

Wniston (John Hurt) is watched over by the televised likeness of Big Brother in his prison cell. (Criterion/MGM)

The film leaves most of its central questions unanswered. Why has Julia chosen Winston? Does she genuinely love him? It seems doubtful. Does she genuinely feel attracted to him? This seems equally implausible. What does she want of him?

Is she seducing him in order to use him toward some end? This seems most plausible, and a conventional film would almost certainly embrace this. However, there is nothing in the novel to suggest this, so the film never goes there. As a result, their entire relationship remains a mystery.

Similarly, why is O’Brien so drawn to Winston, who seems so ordinary? Why does he take such a personal interest in Winston, ensnaring him in a staged resistance operation and then overseeing his torture, over many months? We never learn much anything about O’Brien, so his motivations also remain a mystery.

O’Brien (Richard Burton) tortures Winston (John Hurt). (Criterion/MGM)

In the end, the film is filled with fascinating ideas, but it’s a bit of a chore to sit through. It’s relentlessly dour, flat and monotone. It’s meant to convey a world that is all those things, but it’s tough to stay engaged with something so static. Even the darkest of worlds needs modulation.

Schindler’s List may plumb the depths of misery and despair, but it also brims with humor and narrative complexity. Similarly, The Handmaid’s Tale may be set in an equally hopeless totalitarian nightmare, but it finds constant space for wit and humor in its voiceover, filled with wry observations about its brave new world.

Both of those pieces, and many others, have the confidence to recognize that a story about a brutal dictatorship still needs a gripping narrative filled with conflict, and multiple complex characters, in order to sear itself into our consciousness. Radford’s film fails spectacularly on this count, and thus ends up as something to be intellectually appreciated, rather than to be emotionally engaged by.

Video

Criterion has done film fans an immense service with this release, finally presenting the film as it was intended to look. This was one of the first major films shot by legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins. He and Radford wanted to shoot the film in black-and-white, but were forbidden to do so by the financiers.

Instead, Deakins used a then-revolutionary process called “bleach bypass,” in which the release prints sent to theaters were not dipped in the usual bleach bath as part of their processing. This resulted in intentionally faint, washed out colors and dark, rich blacks.

Unfortunately, this process gives an image that’s only present on the final prints of the film, not on the negative. Previous home video releases used film elements that had not been through this process, so the colors were far too rich and natural, totally against Deakins and Radford’s intentions.

For this release, the original camera negative was rescanned at 4K and Deakins himself oversaw the new transfer. The level of detail in the image is astounding, and the colors are muted, almost looking like an old-fashioned hand tinted image, exactly as the filmmakers intended, for the first time ever on any home video format.

Note: The previous 2015 Blu-ray of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Twilight Time, used an old master that did not fully match Radford and Deakins’s intentions, as these comparison captures demonstrate.

O’Brien (Richard Burton) and Winston (John Hurt) in a fantasy sequence. A frame from the new transfer. (Criterion/MGM)

The same frame from the 2015 Twilight Time Blu-Ray, with deep, lifelike colors that Radford and Deakins did not intend to have visible. (Twilight Time/MGM)

Audio

The audio for Nineteen Eighty-Four also has a troubled history, as detailed by Radford in his interview on the disc. During production, composer Dominic Muldowney wrote all the patriotic anthems that are performed onscreen.

However, as Radford was finishing editing, Richard Branson and his Virgin outfit, which had financed the film, decided they wanted commercial rock/pop music in the film. Without Radford’s knowledge, they hired the pop group The Eurythmics to write a score for the film, and also to record a number of pop songs inspired by the film, so Virgin could market a soundtrack album.

Radford, unaware of this, asked Muldowney to write orchestral music in the meantime. When the film was released, Virgin pulled the Muldowney score and replaced it with the score the Eurythmics had written, which mostly consists of an innocuous drumbeat and occasional subtle vocalizing from Annie Lennox.

Radford was furious and disowned the film for some time, though he says he has since made his peace with the choice and actually likes the work the Eurythmics did. In the end, putting aside the furor over the replacement, it is astonishing how similar the scores are. Both are included here, as alternate audio tracks.

The vast majority of the music in the film is Muldowney’s anthems, and they are the same in both versions.  Both scores really only consist of a few short, quiet bits of music over the film’s various transitional montages and love scenes. It would be exceptionally easy to confuse the two scores. 99% of people could probably be played both versions of the film back to back and not even notice the change.

The only major difference between the two audio tracks is really the final thirty seconds of the end credits, as the last logos are appearing, when a tiny fragment of the Eurythmics’ pop song “Julia” is heard.

Note: It is also important to be aware that the Eurythmics and Muldowney tracks are mislabeled in the Blu-ray’s menu.

If you just pop the disc in and start the movie, the original theatrical Eurythmics track is the default, Track 1. The alternate Muldowney track is Track 2. You can change them manually during play with the “AUDIO” button on your remote.

When you go to the “SOUNDTRACKS” tab on the actual disc menu, “EURYTHMICS” is listed first. However, if you highlight their name, so it becomes bold, you will actually get the Muldowney track. “MULDOWNEY” is listed second. If you highlight his name, so it becomes bold, you will actually get the Eurythmics track.

Extras

The disc includes three new video interviews. Director Michael Radford is interviewed for 22 minutes. He tells about the conception and production of the film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins speaks for 20 minutes about the look of the film, including the famous “bleach bypass” process. Finally, George Orwell historian David Ryan speaks for 21 minutes about the film’s relationship to the novel, comparing it to multiple previous filmed versions. Ryan declares Radford’s film to be far and away the most successful and faithful adaptation.

The disc also includes a 4-minute promotional video recorded on set in 1984, with interviews with Radford and stars John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton.

Finally, the original US trailer is included. It features the Eurythmics song “Sex Crime,” which was on the popular soundtrack album released to promote the film, though it’s not in the film itself. While the trailer is in pretty bad, worn out condition, it’s valuable because it shows what the film looks like without the bleach bypass. The colors are deep and realistic, which Radford and Deakins did not intend.

Grades:

Film: B+

Video: A+

Audio: B+

Extras: B+