Review: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN

 by Rob DiCristino

Because oligarchs are people, too.

Does anyone else remember the VH1 original movie, Two of Us? Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Let It Be) and broadcast in February of the year 2000, it dramatizes a supposedly-real-life reunion between John Lennon (Jared Harris) and Paul McCartney (Aidan Quinn) in New York City over the course of an autumn day in 1976, six years after the break-up of The Beatles. Intimate and understated, Two of Us is built around a series of conversations between the estranged friends — on everything from Wings to Yoko, from spiritualism to Saturday Night Live — and concludes on a note of optimism, a suggestion that these two blokes from Liverpool might someday rekindle the magic that defined a generation. Despite never being much of a Beatles fan (then or now), I always found Two of Us captivating: There’s just something comforting about an imagined world where Paul and John settled their differences before John’s untimely death, a world where towering figures feel more like sensitive and vulnerable human beings than unknowable icons.

Based on the 2022 Giuliano da Empoli novel of the same name, Oliver Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin tries to bring a similar degree of texture to some of the most consequential figures in modern Russian history, specifically Vladislav Surkov, former chief advisor and deputy prime minister to Vladimir Putin. Fictionalized as “Vadim Baranov” (Paul Dano), the shadowy kingmaker helps orchestrate a cultural revolution in post-Soviet Russia that sees the Federation move away from the rigid ideology of communism and toward the capitalist free-for-all that was born in the new millennium. Told in flashbacks over an interview with a Western journalist (Jeffrey Wright as Lawrence Rowland), the film recounts Baranov’s early days as a thespian-turned-theater director, his transition to state-controlled media production — working for TV mogul Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) — and eventually his doctrine of "sovereign democracy,” which would coax FSB director Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) out of the espionage sector and into the international spotlight.

Co-written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrére, The Wizard of the Kremlin parallels two key shifts in post-Cold War Russian culture: the structural collapse that took the country out of the hands of its ineffectual president (George Sogis as Boris Yeltsin) and gave it to the oligarchs, and the philosophical revolution that created an avenue for Baranov to build Putin’s strength through propaganda. Though he was born into a Soviet political family that granted him early access to the party elite, it was Baranov’s misspent youth in the ‘90s bohemian artistic scene that taught him the power of media messaging, a power that he’d wield from the shadows while Putin reasserted Russia’s influence on the world stage. Along for the ride are Baranov’s college frenemy Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) and his lover, Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose transition from performance artist to mobster arm candy symbolizes Russia’s spiritual decay and eventually inspires Baranov to retire before Putin — now firmly entrenched as de facto dictator — no longer has any use for him.

Though he’s mostly known to American audiences for enigmatic thrillers like Personal Shopper and psychological dramas like Clouds of Sils Maria, Oliver Assayas aims to inject The Wizard of the Kremlin with a cold, uncompromising realism, styling his actors as closely to their real-life equivalents as possible — Jude Law’s signature pout is given a threatening new context under his Putin makeup — and interspersing archival footage of events like the Second Chechen War and the Orange Revolution. Dano narrates his character’s rise to power with a tone of grim finality, the kind of self-effacing wisdom that comes with age and experience. His Baranov never seems entirely penitent for his role in the corruption of the Russian state, but he does seem to understand how his vision of politics as avant garde theater helped power-hungry figures like Putin and Sidorov — not to mention infamous deputies like Igor Sechine (Andrei Zayats) — shed any idealistic democratic fantasies and embrace the totalitarianism that characterizes Russia to this day.

But while Assayas’ film deserves credit for illuminating figures and events that have been largely shrouded in mystery until now, it ultimately fails to muster any lasting insight into its titular character or the system of "vertical power” he spearheaded. Paul Dano is a talented actor — despite comments to the contrary from a certain blowhard director — but his Baranov is aloof and one-note, and it’s almost impossible to believe him as a master manipulator of the human psyche. In fact, most of the film’s performances are problematic in one way or another, chiefly because each actor seems to be pulling from a grab-bag of vaguely Anglo-European accents — none of them Russian — that shift from scene to scene. This gives the already overwrought Wizard of the Kremlin a real “community theater” energy that makes it feel less like Two of Us and more like Nuremberg, another unfortunate bit of speculative fiction that asks us to sympathize with ghouls whose refusal to recognize our humanity led to the hellscape we’re all enduring today.

The Wizard of the Kremlin hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 15th.