‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Squanders Its Account of the Rise of Vladimir Putin

How does Vladimir Putin get depicted in film and theater? There’s a question, dear reader, you likely haven’t asked yourself. The answer, it transpires, is not very well. There was Patryk Vega’s biopic “Putin,” from 2024, whose only notable aspect was that it marked one of the first cinematic deployments of artificial intelligence technology. Then there was “Patriots,” a play by “The Crown”‘s Peter Morgan, about the doomed businessman Boris Berezovsky and his relationship with Putin and fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich which was a sensation in the West End only to come a cropper on Broadway, in part due to it being festooned with gags against the real-life backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.Now we have “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” the latest film from French director Olivier Assayas. A few months ago I saw Mr. Assayas introduce a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s 1966 historical banger “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV” at the Metrograph cinema. He had chosen to screen that movie since he felt it occupied similar terrain to “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” which he described as being “about the rise of Vladimir Putin, how Vladimir Putin became the monster he became.”Up to a point, Monsieur Assayas. “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” based on the bestselling novel by Giuliano da Empoli, isn’t really about Putin at all. It’s about a fictional communications operative Vadim Baranov and his transformation from punk artist in the anarchic atmosphere of 1990s post-Soviet Russia to becoming Putin’s prominent political fixer. Baranov, played by Paul Dano, is clearly inspired by Vladislav Surkov, a poet and musician who rose to become Deputy Prime Minister and the president’s strategic representative on earth before being sacked in 2020.“The Wizard of the Kremlin” doesn’t get off to a good start with a ponderous framing device in which Baranov, fresh from being off the Putin payroll, is visited in his Russian countryside retreat by an American foreign policy journalist Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) to whom he is recounts his life story. Some characters Baranov encounters — such as ambitious oligarch Dmitri Sidorov, played by Tom Sturridge, an oligarch and Berezovsky, portrayed by Will Keen, who also took on the role of Putin in the play “Patriots,” enliven proceedings but it’s only when Putin, played by Jude Law, enters the film halfway through that “The Wizard of the Kremlin” starts to weave any kind of magic.Mr. Law is masterful as Putin, vividly bringing to life his twitchy paranoia and impulsive genius onscreen — the only distraction being the actor retaining his homegrown South London accent. He steals every scene he’s in which are too few; for this is about Vadim Baranov, not Vladimir Putin. Jude Law’s finest hour remains his turn as Dickie Greenleaf in Anthony Minghella’s masterpiece “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” coincidentally released in 1999, the same year that Putin first took office. When he left “Ripley,” the oxygen disappeared from that film. Whenever he’s missing from proceedings here, “Wizard” lacks life. Partly this is due to Mr. Dano’s inert, self-conscious performance, not helped by the movie earnestly chronicling Baranov orchestrating various schemes for his boss without supplying any insight into what is driving this wannabe Rasputin.Despite intermittently insightful scenes outlining Russia’s transition from a chaotic democracy to rigid authoritarianism, too often Mr. Assayas, who co-wrote the plodding script, gets bogged down in Baranov’s goings-on, principally his relationship with the free-spirited Ksenia, played by Alicia Vikander. Mr. Dano is a gifted actor but the exploits of his wizard behind the curtain pale in insignificance when compared with the dynamic magnetism of the presidential leading man whose under-utilization is even more bizarre when you consider the film is overlong, at 136 minutes.While “The Wizard of the Kremlin” displays flashes of intelligent flair, it’s hard not to conclude that on the cultural front Putin has got away with it again. The film has flopped all the world, except intriguingly in France where it made $5 million.Dare one wonder whether the commercial fate and artistic quality of such a brazenly indulgent study of political autocracy would have been improved by the intervention of an old-fashioned movie studio dictator strong-arming the quixotic whims of Mr. Assayas into shape?

‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Squanders Its Account of the Rise of Vladimir Putin

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