TIFF Review: Paul Dano and Jude Law in The Wizard of the Kremlin

They say the truth can be stranger than fiction, but sometimes the truth is so twisted that only fiction can cut through to something real. Such is the case with The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictionalization of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in post-Soviet Russia. Directed by Olivier Assayas and adapted by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel of the same name, The Wizard of the Kremlin is a fake version of a grim reality.

Paul Dano stars as Vadim Baranov, a young man at university in the early 1990s after the fall of the USSR. He’s studying theater, mounting avant garde productions and hanging out with artists and punks, change in the air and, finally, real opportunity there for the taking in the new Russia. Dano speaks with a soft voice and slouches around dressed in all black, an appropriately louche artistic young man looking to make his mark on the world. But while “Vadya”, as he is nicknamed, initially believed in the possibilities of a democratic Russia, as oligarchs begin subsuming the country’s resources, natural and financial, he grows cynical and gives up theater for producing reality TV. This leads him to Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who is looking to run a new political figure to replace the aging Boris Yeltsin. His potential new candidate: the head of Russia’s intelligence agency, Vladimir Putin.

Vadya sees some potential in Putin but not the danger, not at first. Putin, meanwhile, scowls his way through meetings and public appearances, a thoroughly uncharming public figure. Jude Law eerily nails the presence of Putin—he doesn’t ever really look like him, but Law gets Putin’s sneer down pat, and his hawklike gaze, a sense that Putin is always three steps ahead and already plotting his rivals’ downfalls. It’s a chilling performance. Of course, we know with the benefit of hindsight that Berezovsky is sealing Russia’s autocratic fate by pushing Putin as a politician, but even if we didn’t know that Law’s performance is so unsettling that the red flags wave themselves.

But no one sees them until it’s too late. By the time Vadya realizes Putin is not the diffident intelligence agent he seemed at first blush, Putin is already president. And then Vadya, deeply cynical and treating international politics like producing TV, commits himself to the folly and serves Putin’s interests, because those become Russia’s interests. The Wizard of the Kremlin does a great job illustrating how an autocrat forces his personality on his people. We are treated to Vadya’s private thoughts and recollections as the film utilizes a framing device in which he recounts his rise and fall with Putin to an academic played by Jeffrey Wright, but we also see his contrasting professional behavior, in which he is fully committed to spinning Putin’s authoritarian control as the necessary “vertical power” that provides order and stability to society. 

Kremlin is the kind of film in which everyone is sporting different accents, but something true emerges from its hodge-podge array of narrative devices and performances. Vadya posits that Putin provides the sense of power and dominance Russians longed for after democracy failed to bring an immediate sense of national pride. Russians, he says, don’t want personal wealth, they’re used to being poor, what they want is to feel purposeful and powerful and Putin fed that impression, in no small part thanks to Vadya’s media manipulations. Whether or not this assertion is really true doesn’t matter, in the context of the film, it feels true.

It might be a western oversimplification, but for an audience looking in from the outside, from Europe and North America, in particular, Kremlin comes across as a lightbulb moment. The film struggles to encompass such a thematic and historically large narrative, and nuance is sacrificed on the alter of dramatic license and narrative expediency, but it does manage to give a sense of how things might have actually gone, with all the competing interests and jockeying for power around Putin. 

Kremlin is a mostly entertaining film about a very dense subject centered on a pair of strong performances from Paul Dano and Jude Law. (Alicia Vikander is also very good but underutilized). Maybe we’ll never know all that really happened, but The Wizard of the Kremlin paints a believable portrait of how authoritarians rise to power, believable enough that you can’t help but see the pattern repeating in America right now.