The Wizard of the Kremlin (now on VOD platforms like Prime Video) is the latest how-we-got-here political drama in which Paul Dano plays the behind-the-curtain power player to Jude Law’s Vladimir Putin. Sound intriguing? It should, considering director Olivier Assayas’ credibility (see: Irma Vep, Personal Shopper) and the versatility and charisma of its two leads. But in execution, this labyrinthine story sprawls wide and shallow: In Soviet Russia, Weezard ov Kremlin ees long, borink movie.
THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Vadim Baronov (Dano) shows off his “vertushka,” a telephone with no dial on it that provided a direct line to the Kremlin: a symbol of a true seat of power in Russia. Note the past tense. It’s just a souvenir now, in 2019, without a cord to connect it to anything. Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), an American journalist, sits down in Baronov’s home nestled in a beautiful, snowy Russian landscape, to hear his story firsthand: How Baronov went from directing regular old theater-type theater to directing the theater that is Russian politics. Namely, the crucial role he played in putting Vladimir Putin in the seat of power, beneath the ideological umbrella of “sovereign democracy,” a term that’s just as nonsensically chaotic as “alternative facts.”
But chaos was the means to the end Baronov sought. We begin with Wright’s overstuffed expository voiceover as he travels to Russia. and transition to Dano’s overstuffed expository voiceover as he outlines his ascent. This means we quickly grow weary of overstuffed expository voiceover. Nevertheless, we persist. Gotta keep on truckin’, as Baronov stages experimental theater in the post-communist over-corrective capitalist excess of the 1990s, then shifts to producing reality TV shows, which may tell us that reality TV may be a key element in the erosion of democracy. We watch as an ailing, alcoholic Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis) is literally propped up in front of a camera to address the country, a right proper symbol of what many deemed to be the softening of a proud and mighty Russia, a place that “needs its strongmen.”
The scene finds Baronov, now cynically scoffing at the puny influence of art and entertainment on the people, eyeing an opportunity to follow a new ideology: “If you don’t grab power, power grabs you.” As he embarks on an affair with a similarly opportunistic and cynical actress, Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), he weasels his way into the silent corridors of Russian power. He “befriends” rich a-holes like Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) and Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) so they can be elevated or railroaded as needed later. Meanwhile, Ksenia ditches him to climb the socioeconomic ladder to luxury, but don’t worry, she’ll be back once his pasture grows greener. Eventually, Baronov and Berezovsky form their own political party and engineer a former KGB podpolkovnik into the President’s office. You know who that is. Yessir: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Law), the icy intimidator who still sits in that seat to this very day, likely pissed off at movies like this, at least behind closed doors. Which is a different kind of pissed off that we’re feeling, waiting for this slowest of slow-burn movies to show signs of a dramatic pulse.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Wizard of the Kremlin angles itself into a bland space between the riotous satire of The Death of Stalin and the unsettling drama of You-Know-Who biopic The Apprentice.
Performance Worth Watching: Playing a fictionalized riff on real-life Putin aide Vladislav Surkov, a doughy-faced Dano is quite clearly Making Choices in the role, with an overly mannered, breathy voice of indeterminate accent, projecting the quiet tone of influence to balance Putin’s grander gestures. I’m not sure it works; too much affectation. That leaves us admiring Law’s ability to project Putin’s more fearsome qualities — which mask masculine insecurities, of course — with a flinty glare atop a frog-faced grimace.
Sex And Skin: Rear naked Dano.
Our Take: Assayas plays the dramatic banality-of-evil card with such understatement, The Wizard of the Kremlin never comes alive. Like Dano’s performance, that’s a Choice too, a strangely stubborn refusal to give us anything resembling high drama. And while that tonal approach functions in theory — the slow seepage of toxicity into the cracks and crannies of everyday life — in execution it renders a 137-minute plod from one long, drawn-out, downplayed conversation to the next. So many scenes find Dano/Baronov sitting down for tea, my own bladder began to feel full by proxy; seemingly dozens of cups later, through reams of flattened strategic/ideological conversations, I had deduced it to be of the Sleepytime variety.
Perhaps Assayas was challenged by the notion of visualizing things like mobilizing Russian-bot social media armies and oligarchs accruing billions, so he leaned on his talent, hoping Dano and Law could charismatically elevate such talky material. As ever, they’re easy to watch, but the screenplay — by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrere, using Guiliana da Empoli’s novel The Wizard of the Kremlin as their basis — is a direct, linear meander through a few decades of political wrangling, exhibiting little narrative thrust. Graceless shifts from scene to scene and on up the timeline are papered over with endless narration, which drones on and on. The arc of Baronov’s life, a rollercoaster from grungy punk clubs to the office of one of the planet’s great political powers to luxurious exile, is weirdly flat. The romance with Tsenia is a fizzling nonstarter. (Vikander is asked to do very little with a character who should be a more vivacious type.) The interactions between Dano and Wright are distressingly nondescript.
The only time The Wizard shows some life is during scenes in which Baronov plays politics with a gang of anarchist Bolshevik bikers, and when Putin grouses about not being as “popular” as Stalin, a moment when Law taps into the type of grim comedy the film needs, and mostly refuses to indulge. Assayas also shows an eye for gilding the literal interiors of the interiors of power, via finely detailed production design. But those rooms are full of figurehead-type quasi-characters talking talking talking, occasionally saying interesting things — “Wolves are not merely predators, they’re also guardians of the forest,” Baronov tells the bikers — in a dull manner. And then the movie just ends, with a moment memorable for its inevitability, but also for the shrugs it inspires.
Our Call: This Wizard exhibits very little magic. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
