Back in olden times, the movies usually waited until political leaders were safely buried before putting them on screen. We’re less deferential now. From Oliver Stone‘s W., which hit theaters when George W. Bush was still in office, to Ali Abbasi‘s The Apprentice, which came out when Donald Trump was seeking his second term, filmmakers now calmly fictionalize stories about those still in power.
The latest to take a bow is Vladimir Putin. Played by Jude Law — surely Putin would be flattered — he’s the dark star at the center of The Wizard of the Kremlin, an exceedingly interesting, if sometimes frustrating, new film. Based on a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, it’s been adapted for the screen by two top-drawer talents: director Olivier Assayas and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Blending made-up characters and real life big shots, Assayas and Carrère offer a bouncy history of how Russia went from a Soviet dictatorship to a new kind of czarism. The wizard of the title isn’t actually Putin, but his media advisor Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano with plump cheeks that look as hermetically polished as Teflon.
During an interview with a Yale professor played by Jeffrey Wright, the now-retired Baranov looks back on his career. It begins during the fall of communism in the Gorbachev era and continues into the lawless ’90s, when Mafia-style capitalism impoverished millions but turned some schemers into billionaire oligarchs.
In that time, Baranov goes from selling electronics to becoming an avant-garde theater director who falls in love with a cynical actress (Alicia Vikander). When she dumps him for an oil oligarch, Baranov realizes that the arts don’t matter in the new, “anything goes” Russia. He decides that he wants to be at the heart of his times. So he goes into TV, creating trashy reality shows, and becoming a protégé of Boris Berezovsky, a real-life oligarch who owns the country’s biggest channel.
