Vladimir Putin does not appear for the first 45 minutes of The Wizard of the Kremlin, an odd choice for a satirical film entirely about him. His presence looms in the background—the future Russian premier is jokingly referred to as “the Tsar” by the narrators—yet the director, Olivier Assayas, seems more interested in explaining the strange country Putin inherited, at least initially. Keeping Putin off-screen for a while makes perfect storytelling sense: The film, an adaptation of a 2022 novel of the same name, aims to understand how post-Soviet Russia’s brief cosmopolitan boom in the 1990s was eventually quashed under Putin’s rule, so it spends time illustrating what will be lost. But that means the movie’s most effective element remains locked away for far too long.
Jude Law plays Putin in an extraordinary performance; wearing a near-permanent grimace and barely ever raising his voice, he’s a nonetheless transfixing screen presence. Yet The Wizard of the Kremlin’s titular role refers not to him, but to Vadim Baranov (played by Paul Dano). Inspired by Putin’s former aide Vladislav Surkov, Baranov experiences a similar rise and fall over a 30-year period, up to the present day; he develops from an energetic young artist into a political kingmaker and, eventually, an outcast. The movie’s weakness, however, is that it’s focused on Putin’s unknowability—yet he’s accessible only through Baranov, who is far less engaging.
The script, co-written by Assayas and the French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, is a series of nesting flashbacks initially told through the eyes of Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), a writer in search of the now-exiled Baranov. Rowland is summoned to Baranov’s dacha to hear his life story, and Dano takes over the narration duties to lay out the final months of Soviet Russia; the emergence and downfall of Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin; and Baranov’s machinations as a TV executive turned government adviser. Dano brings an intentional flatness to his performance as Baranov, whom he portrays as a chameleon, quietly ruminating on how his country is changing and how to change with it.
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The film gets at the notion that people like Baranov seized on an idea of Russia, then packaged it to the public through the glitzy post-Soviet media. While working at a network run by the business oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), Baranov needs to find a new potential leadership figure to push on television. He decides that much of the populace longs for a more authoritarian ruler than they had in Yeltsin—and he soon alights on Putin, the then-director of the FSB (the successor of the KGB). Baranov and Berzovsky hope that Putin will present as stern, seemingly capable of keeping internal bureaucracy in line; meanwhile, Russia’s new class of billionaires will be able to operate unimpeded. The viewer likely understands that expecting Putin to play along is naive. Even if viewers didn’t know what direction Russia eventually took under Putin, however, the character’s powerful but coiled demeanor quickly makes apparent that such credulity has consequences.
Watching the movie while reflecting on Law’s early-career pretty-boy persona is funny: He established himself by playing rakish Brits with tousled hair and a glittering smile. Yet as he’s gotten older, he’s become surprisingly adept at portraying eccentric or mysterious villains and antiheroes. (The first time I realized he’d entered this new character-actor phase, in fact, was in 2009’s Anna Karenina; he played the cuckolded Karenin, another Russian figure—but a much sadder and more impotent one.) As Putin, Law is not strongly affecting an accent or even trying to physically approximate the real-life person. Still, he conveys a sense of danger, cloaked in a soft-spoken, slight manner.
Baranov, conversely, is a flashy communicator. He’s obsessed with positioning Putin as the kind of strongman who ordinary Russians want to lead them out of financial downturns and corruption crises. Putin comes across as a much more calculated figure than his companions anticipated, yet he’s just as savvy—he knows how to incrementally amass control once he’s atop the heap and expel allies when they ask too much of him (including Berezovsky). As the film descends into a slow-motion, mundane work of political horror, Law remains compelling. But empathizing with Dano’s Baranov, the movie’s putative protagonist, is tough, both because the viewer is aware of what he’s getting into, and because the actor’s low-key work interprets him as such a resolutely amoral, unlovable man.
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Assayas has made several thrillers about moments of political instability, such as the energetic Something in the Air (set in France after the protests of 1968) and the sweeping crime thriller Carlos (about the Venezuelan political terrorist Carlos the Jackal). Although The Wizard of the Kremlin is topically similar, it’s sleepier and more methodical than its predecessors. Perhaps the pace reflects the director, decades into his career, moving away from showier filmmaking as he ages. After the slow plod of its first act—and particularly thanks to Law—the movie does arrive at something mesmerizing: a taciturn, but brutal, piece of political tragedy.
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