I have not read Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel The Wizard of the Kremlin, on which French director Olivier Assayas’ largely listless new film is based, but if it’s anything like the cinematic adaptation, one has to question why it has received its accolades. A compendium of well-known facts about the last 40 years of Russia’s momentous upheaval and recovery (of a sort), the story is one of those narratives that seeks out the frisson of real-life horror through the eyes of an imaginary protagonist. Historical fiction is often engrossing, except when our focus is taken away from the main event to linger on a person of fabricated consequence. Especially one as boring as this.
In The Wizard of the Kremlin, the titular mage is one Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano, Spaceman, here looking inexplicably embalmed), apparently loosely based on an actual person, Vladislav Surkov. Given that almost everyone else in the movie—from Boris Berezovsky to Yevgeny Prigozhin to Vladimir Putin and others—bears their actual name, one has to wonder why this particular sleight of hand. Adding to the unnecessary muddle is the presence of an American journalist (also made up), Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright, The Batman, deserving better), whose conversation with Baranov frames and directs the action, seen through flashback.
The best part of this superficial retread of a topic with nothing new to say is Jude Law (The Nest), who plays Putin with impressive behavioral evolution. It is easy to believe the soon-to-be-dictator as an insecure bureaucrat when first we meet him, and engaging to watch him develop into a tyrant. His motivations are clear, and Law never overplays his hand.
It would have been nice to see Dano bring similar simmering energy to his own performance. He leans too much into the mystery of Baranov/Surkov, who is designed as a cypher and never becomes actual flesh and blood, despite the presence of a love interest, Ksenya, played by an underused Alicia Vikander (Tomb Raider). Instead, Baranov remains little more than an authorly construct. Worse, he is one filled with platitudes about the state of Russia and reasons for its fate.
The fall of the Soviet Union was a calamitous affair for most of that vast nation’s citizens, at least the Russians who missed their first-world status as the economy collapsed. It is no wonder that after almost a decade of ostensible freedom and democracy under then-president Boris Yeltsin, they would welcome anyone who could restore a semblance of order. And if that person had no qualms about staging fake terrorist attacks to get public opinion on his side, his popularity could thereafter be assured.
All of this is addressed, but what is never explained is why the apparently cultured and erudite Baranov would so eagerly help usher in the new authoritarian order. We are meant to accept his conversion as a fait accompli, but it makes little sense. Then again, he is not a real person, so why should we care. I certainly don’t.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.