There’s surely a more incisive, enlightening version of Olivier Assayas’ (Personal Shopper) enjoyable but strictly meat-and-two-veg recap of modern Russian political history waiting to be made. The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.
It’s unsurprising that a French director and screenwriter adapting a book by a Swiss-Italian author with a cast of Americans, Brits and Swedes, filming in Latvia, struggles to burrow deep into the psyche of one of the world’s most secretive political cultures. The Wizard of the Kremlin never shakes the sense of being a best-guess at the cold realities of modern Russia.
And there’s an ersatz quality to Assayas’s drama that’s not aided by a hackneyed framing device that has Jeffrey Wright’s US journalist summoned to a snowy dacha for a history lesson from mystery ex-Kremlin fixer Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). He’s based on Vladislav Surkov, the so-called ‘new Rasputin’ who ruthlessly expedited the dictator’s rise to power during the helter-skelter, oligarchic post-Yeltsin days of the 1990s.
You’ll feel for the American Fiction star as he’s left nodding solemnly while Dano blasts through reams of exposition. Baranov tees up flashbacks to rowdy student parties, his early career in Moscow’s avant-garde theatre scene (very Zoolander), a headrush romance with Vikander’s punky good-time girl Ksenia and a rivalry with hedonistic banker Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge). Then comes rebirth as a gifted TV exec under the wing of spivvish media oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Wolf Hall’s Will Keen sounding so much like Harold Shand, you’re half-waiting for him to splutter: ‘The KGB? I shit ‘em!’).
There’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians
That Dano’s svengali is so willing to spill the tea on his part in Boris Yeltsin's drunken but victorious election campaign and security chief Putin’s subsequent anointing to an American journalist, or why Wright’s hack fails to get any of it on the record, only reinforces the sense of artifice. But the plot does thicken significantly when Law’s Putin arrives as a new president armed with a sly half-smile, some brooding menace and utter ruthlessness.
Screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère knows this world – he wrote a novel about poet-dissident Eduard Limonov that was itself turned into a film by Kirill Serebrennikov (Limonov cameos as a character here too) – and there’s some interesting details on the rise of nationalist mercenaries the Wagner Group, Putin’s flex back to a Stalinist model of leadership, and Berezovsky’s fall from grace.
But for all its colour and bursts of energy, The Wizard of the Kremlin is too superficial to drill into the dark heart of this realm of repression, violence and cynicism. It’s unlikely to trouble the current occupant of that Moscow palace.
The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered at the Venice Film Festival.