Having spent much of this century fashioning such delicate fancies as Personal Shopper and The Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas returns to the muscular geopolitical storytelling of Carlos, his biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, with this sprawling attempt to map the ideological transformation of post-Soviet Russia through the rise of Vladimir Putin.
Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin opens by insistently declaring itself fiction. It is, rather, a lightly fictionalised biopic of Vladislav Surkov, architect of the modern Kremlin, a mysterious figure in the West save for a few choice sightings in such similarly ambitious projects as Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self and HyperNormalisation.
What follows is a dense, exhaustively narrated account of power, media manipulation and political storytelling that too often mistakes exposition for drama.
The story is clunkily framed as a conversation between an American writer, Roland (Jeffrey Wright), and a Surkov surrogate, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). From this encounter, Baranov recounts his journey from 1990s television executive to inner architect of Putin’s political machine, charting Russia’s passage from chaotic post-USSR liberalisation to carefully curated stability.
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Baranov’s voiceover, though compelling in the early wild west and post-Soviet sections, is near constant, preserving undigestible chunks of the source material. Close your eyes and it might be an audiobook with a starry reader. Too often the resulting film feels like a prestige television series compressed into an unwieldy feature length: segmented, overstuffed and ever explanatory.
The film sharpens at the level of performance. For all the clumsy voiceover, Dano remains a twinkling enigma, even if the script, written by the director and Emmanuel Carrère, reduces him to more of a witness than a participant.
Mostly the film is a showcase for Jude Law’s increasingly impressive late-career metamorphosis. The actor, who has spent recent years successfully probing wounded masculinities (The Young Pope, Firebrand), brings a strikingly controlled energy to his portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a lofty and weaponised civil servant.
In cinemas from Friday, April 17th
