“In general,” observes the Narrator, played with dry clarity by Jeffrey Wright, “things in Russia go pretty well. But when they go bad, they go really bad.” That line sets the tone for Olivier Assayas’ engrossing look at twenty-first century realpolitik. Beginning in 2019 and ricocheting through earlier years, The Wizard Of The Kremlin doubles as a cautionary tale for the West, sketching echoes of Franz von Papen’s miscalculation with Hitler while glancing at American debates around Project 25.
Assayas is not flinging the F-word around for shock value. The film is less about fascism than about the sleight of hand of fake democracy. Our way in is an academic observer who regards Putin’s Russia as a kind of avant-garde artwork. It tracks, given a cultural lineage where poets and provocateurs have often flirted with the right. Eduard Limonov hovers over the film, popping up for a pivotal cameo that nods to Emmanuel Carrère, Assayas’ co-writer and the author of the Limonov book.
A preface insists this is fiction. Still, it is hard not to clock the resemblance between the film’s central figure Vadim Baranov and Vladislav Surkov. Paul Dano plays Baranov as a courteous fog machine, his voice soft and unhurried, his expression boyish and unreadable. Now retired, Baranov invites the Narrator in and begins to unspool his past. He is weirdly candid for a spin doctor, which is part of the point. When truth is malleable, what does honesty even mean, and do facts still hold any weight?
Baranov’s path runs from punk experiments under Gorbachev, fueled by Mayakovsky and the Futurists, to some memorably bad theater. Restless to shape events rather than mirror them, he drifts into television and the orbit of producer Boris Berezovsky, played by Will Keen with sleek, dangerous charm. Money and media blur into politics, and through Berezovsky he meets Vladimir Putin, here initially resistant to grooming as Yeltsin’s heir.
The film excels at showing how television manufactures consent. Satire gets muzzled, with a subplot about the show Kukly pulled from air after mocking Putin. Ideological extremes mingle in Baranov’s laboratory of influence, where biker gangs and esoteric religious cranks become instruments to ballast a hardening state. The ideas are lucid and unnervingly contemporary.
For a 156 minute feature, the pacing rarely sags. In fact, the material could have blossomed as a limited series, which is where Assayas has previously thrived with Carlos. Performance-wise, Dano is fascinating, a study in courteous menace. Jude Law, however, is a misstep as Putin. He nails the pout but the accent and physical carriage never fuse into a believable presence, and that fracture keeps pulling the film out of its spell at crucial moments.
Even so, the film has real potential. Its diagnosis of mediated power is incisive, its structure confident, its themes sticky. With a stronger choice for Putin, this might have landed as a defining political drama of the moment. As it stands, it is a bracing and provocative conversation starter about the stories states tell and the storytellers who script them.