Back in olden times, the movies usually waited until political leaders were safely buried before putting them on screen. We're less deferential now. From Oliver Stone's W., which hit theaters when George W. Bush was still in office, to Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, which came out when Donald Trump was seeking his second term, filmmakers now calmly fictionalize stories about those still in power.
The latest to take a bow is Vladimir Putin. Played by Jude Law — surely Putin would be flattered — he's the dark star at the center of The Wizard of the Kremlin, an exceedingly interesting, if sometimes frustrating, new film. Based on a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, it's been adapted for the screen by two top-drawer talents: director Olivier Assayas and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Blending made-up characters and real life big shots, Assayas and Carrère offer a bouncy history of how Russia went from a Soviet dictatorship to a new kind of czarism. The wizard of the title isn't actually Putin, but his media advisor Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano with plump cheeks that look as hermetically polished as Teflon.
During an interview with a Yale professor played by Jeffrey Wright, the now-retired Baranov looks back on his career. It begins during the fall of communism in the Gorbachev era and continues into the lawless '90s, when Mafia-style capitalism impoverished millions but turned some schemers into billionaire oligarchs.
In that time, Baranov goes from selling electronics to becoming an avant-garde theater director who falls in love with a cynical actress (Alicia Vikander). When she dumps him for an oil oligarch, Baranov realizes that the arts don't matter in the new, "anything goes" Russia. He decides that he wants to be at the heart of his times. So he goes into TV, creating trashy reality shows, and becoming a protégé of Boris Berezovsky, a real-life oligarch who owns the country's biggest channel.
Berezovsky is looking for a sturdy, malleably corrupt successor to the Russian Federation's fading president, drunken Boris Yeltsin. He settles on a balding, taciturn, slightly nondescript KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. Although Putin's at first reluctant, Baranov persuades him to run for office by arguing that Russians have always needed — indeed craved — authority from the top.
Now there's an idea that Putin can get behind. He quickly turns on the clever Berezovsky, who thought he could control his creation (always a mistake). And Baranov becomes Putin's media guru until 2014, dreaming up things like Russia's use of the internet to destabilize the West by flooding social media with extremist ideas.
The Wizard of the Kremlin contains so much sharp dialogue that I wish its story was more dramatic. While individual scenes brim with life — Assayas really knows how to evoke a society on the move — the action as a whole feels rushed, episodic and a tad abstract. For instance, Vikander's character is less a full-fledged woman than an alluring symbol of Russia's divided soul.
Yet despite all its flaws, the movie's worth seeing just for Law's portrayal of Putin, which isn't merely juicy but revelatory. In his composed posture, ironic smile and flashes of anger, we sense what makes this man tick — his canniness, brutality, rough humor, paranoia and resentment of the West, which, he believes, tries to make him feel small. Watching Law's Putin in action, I got a clearer sense of why this man — whom Baranov calls The Czar — jails or murders anyone he finds threatening and why he feels righteous about invading Ukraine.
In contrast, the wizard himself remains elusive. Based on a real-life figure named Vladislav Surkov, Baranov is opaque, perhaps even to himself. Some viewers are annoyed by this and by Dano's stylized deadpan — what is he thinking?
But the wizard's inner life isn't what matters. It's his deeds. He's one of those brainy, morally vacant political strategists you find all over the world. As he sits in his country house talking, you wonder whether Baranov ever believed in the dictatorship he was helping to create, or whether he just enjoyed seeing his ideas triumph in the real world — like staging a successful play.
In the end, The Wizard of the Kremlin is less about exposing Putin's authoritarian nature than about capturing an emblematic figure of our age. Baranov is a man who's excited by serving malevolent power, even knowing it will probably destroy him.
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