The Wizard of the Kremlin

When dramatising recent history, what factors differentiate dry fact from galvanising drama; or journalistic recounting of small details from an expansive view of the big picture? Moreover, what particular alchemy results in the once-in-a-blue-moon occasion where a biodrama achieves both? It’s a question one is granted a sprawling 156 minutes to ponder in Olivier Assayas’s slick, propulsive recounting of recent Russian history. Though never less than watchable, this adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s semi-fictionalised novel struggles to find the ideal balance. Without an animating dramatic force, it can feel as if the audience is sitting in a hail of cascading Wikipedia pages, without a compelling centre to ground them.

The issue may be endemic to da Empoli’s source material, which frames the decades-spanning tale through an imagined interview between the author (here reimagined as an American journalist played by Jeffrey Wright) and a wholly fictional spin doctor. As he tells it, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano) once aspired to be the toast of the Russian theatre, aiming to make change from the idealistic bubble of campus life. Ultimately unsatisfied with the arts as a tool of change, Baranov swapped them out for the media (like trading “a horse and cart for a Lamborghini”, he smugly reflects), eventually arriving at the halls of absolute power.

To a point, this Virgil-like figure is captivating for his eerie all-knowingness, but this comes with drawbacks. With his slightly dazed, broadly English-accented affect, Dano is more ghostly mirage than persuasive human being. We’re engaged by his story, but we rarely fully believe in it, perhaps because the character is ultimately (and no doubt purposefully) a void. At the point in his tale when the then-aspiring power player and the equally ambitious Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Jude Law, all lips and brow) finally cross paths, Baranov’s placidity as a narrator leaves The Wizard of the Kremlin stranded, his viewpoint so deliberately opaque it can feel akin to no viewpoint at all.

Perhaps, with his 2022 debut play Patriots, Peter Morgan already had the question of how to tell the story of Putin’s rise, and from which perspective, figured out. In the play, the all-powerful oligarch Boris Abramovich Berezovsky is both calculating kingmaker and tragic fool. Initially seeing in Putin a bland candidate who’d make an easily mouldable puppet of Russia’s oligarchy, Berezovsky soon finds himself the architect of his own downfall, forsaken by the man he helped lift into power. Offsetting Tom Hollander’s blustery performance in the role was Will Keen, playing Putin as a stiff, aridly humourless bureaucrat whose charmlessness is tempered only by his ruthless efficiency. The fact that Keen features in The Wizard of the Kremlin, this time playing Berezovsky, is the closest thing the film has to a joke, though it’s one that Keen’s performance rises above. The actor is terrific as his former scene counterpart, rendering the string-pulling billionaire equally repellent, magnetic and, finally, pitiful as his protégés turn their backs on him. Whenever Keen’s Berezovsky is onscreen, he becomes The Wizard’s engine and life force. In all his patent unrealness, Baranov cannot compete.

Ultimately, this pacy, deliberately dry chronicle of recent Russian history moves at a great clip without insulting viewers’ intelligence, and its sturdy ensemble offers multiple striking performances. Still, one wonders if its blank canvas of a narrator is not ultimately a detriment, and whether a narrative point of view that would render the hard facts as properly gripping storytelling may have been found elsewhere.