There’s a big difference between reciting history and dramatizing it, and The Wizard of the Kremlin falls victim to doing the former far more than the latter.
A tour of post-Cold War Russia given by a fictional character who operates as a Forrest Gump-ian Zelig with his hand in every aspect of the country’s multiple transformations, French auteur Oliver Assayas’ adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel boasts a solid turn by Jude Law as Vladimir Putin. It also affords astute insights into the nation’s character, charting its course from its 1990s flirtation with democracy to its present-day authoritarianism.
What it boasts in perceptiveness, however, it lacks in grace, as the film—screening at the Toronto International Film Festival—is a prototypical example of talking, ceaselessly and crudely, at the audience.
The Wizard of the Kremlin’s action is framed by a meeting between American journalist Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) and once-influential advisor Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano) at the latter’s forest-enclosed estate, where Baranov engages his guest in an endless monologue about individuals and events which are already ostensibly familiar to the reporter, who’s lived in and written about Moscow at length.
Theirs is a chat designed to inform not each other but the proceedings’ viewers, and the script (co-written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère) fashions every conversation in equally leaden, lecture-y terms. For a director who’s often navigated liminal spaces, it’s at once shocking and disappointing to discover Assayas resorting to such blunt sermonizing, which so infects his latest that it comes across as a magazine feature brought to dull, preachy life.
Baranov is a creation of da Empoli’s imagination, and as embodied by Dano with flat detachment, he’s a sketchy storytelling device, crafted to illuminate various aspects of Russia’s modern evolution and to provide entrée into its confidential quarters.
As he explains to Rowland over the course of their prolonged discussion, he was born to a loyal communist party member father who immediately knew that Gorbachev (“a glass of milk”) heralded the end of the Soviet Union. Just as his father recognizes his own obsolescence, Baranov views the wild openness that follows as an opportunity.
His hustling earns him a foothold in this new world order, first in a punk-rock art scene where he meets and strikes up a romance with transgressive Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), and later in reality television, an uninhibited arena that allows him to present to Russians a different, Westernized vision of themselves.
Baranov’s gift for media manipulation makes him an attractive and useful figure to oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who’s cozied up to current Russian president Boris Yeltsin—and is using his television apparatus to keep the leader in office—as a means of wielding power from the shadows.
Keen earned deserved accolades for his West End and Broadway portrayal of Putin in Peter Morgan’s narratively and thematically similar Patriots, and he’s equally assured in the part of the ruler’s nemesis, conveying the rapacious ambition and greed that fueled Berezovsky and his oligarch ilk, as well as the sincere belief in democracy that drove (and justified) his self-serving behavior. He’s the sole actor to give an intricate three-dimensional performance, and his scenes are the highlight of Assayas’ cinematic Ted Talk.
In a late meeting about the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Baranov states that the masses simply understand, and respond to, kitsch, and The Wizard of the Kremlin speaks it well, espousing one banal pronouncement after another.
Clunky barely begins to describe the screenplay’s dialogue, although the film nonetheless offers a handy primer on Russia’s recent up-and-down development. To maintain his grip on the presidency, Berezovsky orchestrates the selection of Federal Security Service (FSB) director Vladimir Putin (Law) as Yeltsin’s successor.
In a mistake that has catastrophic consequences for himself, Russia, and the globe, Baranov assumes he can control his proxy, only to learn that Putin is a puppetmaster rather than a puppet, and his ideology—rooted in ruthless ideas about strength, power, and national pride—isn’t democratic but Stalinist. Before long, Berezovsky is forced to flee in exile while Baranov becomes the budding dictator’s right-hand man.
The Wizard of the Kremlin proceeds to touch upon various key moments in 21st-century Russian history, including the 2000 Kursk nuclear submarine disaster, the 2014 invasion of Crimea, and the regime’s foray into cyberwarfare. Along the way, it contends that Putin’s gift is finding novel methods of modernizing old-school tyrannical tactics (like sowing across-the-board chaos so that even enemies serve as assets), as well as comprehending that his countrymen desire wealth, liberty, and comfort less than they crave a strongman who’ll make them feel tough and merciless.
Such truths are sprinkled throughout the film. Yet unfortunately, they’re conveyed via a barrage of wooden trailer-ready exclamations in gabby scenes that, save for one nice window reflection-framed moment, Assayas doesn’t visually enliven.
Law’s Putin is the showiest aspect of The Wizard of the Kremlin, and if the actor fails to get completely under the autocrat’s skin, he’s still believably stern and nasty. The problem is that he’s peripheral for long stretches of this tale, as Assayas wastes an inordinate amount of time on the one-dimensional Baranov’s personal life (he eventually reconnects with the equally empty Ksenia) and professional speechifying.
Dano’s muted protagonist is merely a symbolic vessel and mouthpiece for larger socio-political issues, and his decision to go along with Putin’s ugliness—thereby betraying his former ideals—is intended to reflect the choice made by his fellow Muscovites. Whenever he opens his mouth (which is constantly), the voice that’s heard isn’t that of a convincing character but, instead, of Assayas and Carrère.
Moving between offices, drawing rooms, studies, villas, and restaurants, The Wizard of the Kremlin never energizes its info-dump saga; watching it feels not unlike being trapped at a cocktail party with a know-it-all who won’t shut up. To a greater extent than the blank Baranov, it’s the film that’s truly cynical, assuming that moviegoers don’t care, or won’t notice, that they’re being told—and told, and told—rather than shown why Russia (and those that followed its path) gave up on freedom in favor of fascism.
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