The Hollow Trickery of “The Wizard of the Kremlin”

At the start of Olivier Assayas’s “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a title card declares that, though the film is adapted from a novel of the same name, by Giuliano da Empoli, and is based on historical events, “it remains an original work of fiction with artistic intent. The characters, as well as their statements and opinions, are fictional.” When the action begins, the point seems clear enough: a fictitious Yale professor named Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) reminisces about a 2019 visit to Russia to the country estate of one Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former political strategist then living in luxurious isolation with his young daughter. Lawrence had written an article about Vadim, and Vadim, who respects Lawrence as a scholar, now wants to tell him his life story. So far so fictional. Vadim begins by recounting his youth as the privileged son of a Soviet-era official who was cast aside under the liberalizing Gorbachev regime; the reversal of fortune roused the young Vadim to make the most of his life. As Vadim speaks, events unfold onscreen in flashbacks: after a stint of odd jobs like selling foreign electronic goods, he became a theatre director and frequented Moscow’s hipster scene. He began a relationship with a rock singer and punk provocateur named Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) who then left him for a rich young businessman (Tom Sturridge). Vadim traded his artistic calling for a flashy job in a privatized TV station and was then tapped for a political consultancy by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen)—halt!

Anyone who’s been reading the news in the past few decades knows that Berezovsky is no fictional character but a real-life Russian oligarch who fell out with Vladimir Putin and then was found dead, in Berkshire, in 2013, ostensibly from suicide. (A coroner’s inquest was inconclusive.) The movie, which Assayas co-wrote with Emmanuel Carrère, tells the story of how Berezovsky recruited Vadim as a behind-the-scenes fixer to launch Putin (Jude Law) into politics as the designated successor of the older and ailing Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis). Once in office, Putin installed Vadim as an adviser to help consolidate his administration into an autocracy responsible for the suppression of civil liberties, for wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, and for a campaign of disinformation and interference in Western democracies. The movie is filled with other real-life figures, including Garry Kasparov (Dmitryi Turchaninov) and Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke), Igor Sechin (Andrei Zayats) and Yevgeny Prigozhin (Andris Keišs). As for Vadim, he’s based on the real-life Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Assayas makes a point of foregrounding the fictionalization of his characters. Paradoxically, though, the freedom granted by that premise is used, in the movie, not to amplify the historical record but to distract from it.

The thematic core of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the shifting connection between appearances and realities, between what’s to be done and how it’s spun. When Putin plots war against Chechnya, Vadim warns him off the conflict as a quagmire and a potential disaster, but Putin worries neither about the outcome nor about the impression it will leave: he’s planning a campaign of ruthless brutality and has no intention of waging “a humane war, like the Americans do.” Above all, Putin favors big shows of Russian dignity and power. Vadim learns from this mentality: when Russia unleashes internet interference against Western democracies, under a program led by Prigozhin, Vadim assures him of the benefit of doing so openly and not hiding Russia’s traces: “Anything that makes you seem strong actually increases that strength.”