It’s close to an hour into “The Wizard of the Kremlin” before Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) shows up, but as soon as he does, exuding a calm whiplash anger and threat, he brings the movie into laser-like focus. Law, with burning eyes and a tight grimace, plays Putin by taking total command — of whatever room he’s in, and of the movie. He asserts himself with a feral decisiveness rooted in animal cunning.
The way Law plays him, Putin is something almost scarier than a monster — a rational tyrant, a man to mess with, or even disagree with, at your peril. He doesn’t start out by coveting power (the powers that be have come to him), but he believes that raw power, from the top, is what the Russian people crave. He may be right. (In one scene, we’re told that when asked in a poll to name their favorite leader, the Russians still choose Stalin.) I wish that Law didn’t play the role with his gruff Cockney-inflected British accent — it would have been better if he’d adopted a Russian accent, to capture more of Putin’s brusqueness. Yet he perfectly channels Putin’s cold-blooded glare, infusing him with a reptilian charisma. The real Vladimir Putin has a special duality: His eyes look like they want to kill you, his mouth doesn’t move a muscle. And Law nails that. His Putin explains that he’s going to restore the vertical authority that’s gone out of Russia — an ominous message. Yet whenever he’s onscreen, we actually like Putin, because he’s such a shrewdly concentrated gangster-autocrat. We always want to see more of him, not less.
It’s the late ’90s, and up until then we’ve been watching a portrait of Russia, after the downfall of the Soviet Union, as a slovenly trough of capitalist excess — almost a decadent parody of freedom, with young people cavorting in nightclubs as they guzzle vodka and listen to punk-rock anarchists imitating what they’ve heard in the West. The Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, is an ailing drunk who’s so ineffectual that at one point he has to be propped up in his chair to give a TV address. Russia needs a new leader, and Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), a devious oligarch, has helped assemble the Unity party, a crew of oligarchs and governors eager to find a figurehead prime minister they can elevate into a glorified puppet. Putin seems a good choice, because he’s the head of the Federal Security Service (the successor to the KGB), and they presume that he’ll remain a buttoned-up state bureaucrat who knows how to take orders. But they are wrong. They’ve drastically underestimated him.
Putin, in fact, is not the main character in “The Wizard of the Kremlin.” That would be Vadim Baranov, a former avant-garde theater director and reality-TV producer who’s a comrade of Berezovsky’s, and who becomes Putin’s right-hand manipulator — a Machiavellian guru/media assassin who orchestrates Putin’s public image and figures out all sorts of ways to neuter his enemies. He’s like a fusion of Mark Burnett, Marshall McLuhan and Roger Stone. “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is adapted from a 2022 novel by Guiliano da Empoli, and the character of Baranov (a fictional riff on Vladislav Surkov, who was Putin’s real-life shadow counselor) is played by Paul Dano, a chameleon who looks and acts different here than you’ve ever seen him before.
His Baranov has a big doughy white moon face, topped by a series of ugly Russian haircuts (twentysomething hipster bowl cut; short, severe parted office-drone ‘do). But within that slightly eccentric look, Dano gives a wily and insinuating performance. He, too, speaks in a British accent, in this case a silvery posh one, and he delivers each line with an impish hauteur just this side of smirky, as if he were floating truths that only he could see. The paradox of Baranov is that he’s a brilliant dude who is also, on some level, an empty vessel. He’ll do whatever it takes to prop up Putin’s increasingly ruthless regime, and he does it without compunction, as if the world of political images were a giant 3D chessboard made for him to manipulate.
I wish I could say that “The Wizard of the Kremlin” was a movie as gripping as Law’s Putin is, or one that exerts the total amoral fascination of Baranov’s postmodern totalitarian scheming. But the movie, directed by Olivier Assayas (from a script he co-wrote with Emmanuel Carrère), is at once absorbing and diffuse. It’s episodic to a fault, and despite these two ace performances it never finds a forceful dramatic center. At heart, it’s really just a visually opulent TV-movie — the story of Putin’s rise to power in the 2000s, which should, in theory, have the kick of a mule, except that a lot of it is old news, and these days it tends to be overwhelmed in our imaginations by the more recent actions of Putin, with regard to both the war in Ukraine and his crackdowns on Russian society. He’s become an autocrat of the most extreme nature, leaving an epic trail of blood.
You could almost characterize “The Wizard of the Kremlin” as a Russia-world equivalent of “The Apprentice,” the rise-of-Donald Trump drama that was released in 2024 with a lot of fanfare and, in the end, not much audience interest. In that movie, Trump was tutored in the ways of heartless power by Roy Cohn; here, Putin is schooled in the semiotics of propaganda trickery by Baranov, the dark media genius. But “The Apprentice” was the more compelling of the two films; it kept you watching. “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is two-and-a-half hours long, and some of it just lopes along, because it’s got that one-thing-after-another quality that’s the hallmark of the made-for-TV movie. There’s no doubt that Assayas, at his best (“Personal Shopper,” “Summer Hours,” “Carlos”), is a greater filmmaker than that, but in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” he hasn’t really solved the script problem — how to not just show us the stuff that Baranov does but draw us into a potent identification with him.
Dano’s performance, while on some level delectable, is also rather one-note. We’re kept at arm’s length from what Baranov actually feels about what he’s doing. There’s a standard framing device — Baranov, retired, is interviewed in his country home by an American author (the redoubtable Jeffrey Wright). And Baranov is given a romantic relationship, one that stretches back to the early ’90s, when he first meets Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a singer and party girl who goes on to become a tech bro’s plaything mistress and finally winds up back with Baranov. Vikander plays her with a salacious spark, but I never “cared” about this relationship — it just seems as if it’s there to humanize Baranov in some way.
The movie, with Baranov as its scoundrel tour guide, works its way through some of 21st century Russia’s greatest hits of deception. We see how the bombings of apartment buildings in suburban Moscow (which many claimed, from the outset, to have been a Putin plot) were used to ramp up fear and propel the war in Chechnya, how the Orange Revolution in Ukraine stoked Putin’s desire to absorb that country, and we hear Baranov’s visionary plan for Russia’s online infiltration of America. Is it about spreading propaganda or supporting one presidential candidate? No, it’s about throwing every crackpot thing possible against the wall so that the ensuing chaos makes us all nuts. (Sorry, but I think Americans on social media did a good enough job of that on their own.) Yet even as “The Wizard of the Kremlin” flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.
