Giuliano da Empoli’s smash-hit satirical novel The Wizard of the Kremlin, about a Putin spin doctor called Vadim Baranov and based on shadowy Russian politician Vladislav Surkov, has now been converted into an exasperatingly laborious and literal-minded movie, burdened with endless dull voiceover. It has been written for the screen by its estimable director Olivier Assayas, working with the formidable author and reportage journalist Emmanuel Carrère; Carrère in fact has a cameo here, playing a supercilious French figure at a raucous Moscow student party in the early 90s, patronisingly informing the young people present that it was the communism they’ve just rejected that really believed in the arts.
The action takes us through the 1990s decline of ailing president Boris Yeltsin and the promotion of FSB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister by entrenched oligarchic interests who assume he will be their apparatchik puppet. Through the eyes of our strangely cynical media-manipulator hero, we see Putin’s presidential election triumph in 2000, the sinking of the Kursk submarine, which tested the president’s neo-Stalinist ruthlessness in ignoring public-opinion pressure orchestrated by unreliable courtier and media magnate Boris Berezovsky (who was destined for a lonely death in UK exile), the Chechen wars, the annexation of Crimea, the development of internet black ops and bot farms, and Putin’s growing hatred of Ukraine. Will Keen plays the bullish and hubristic Berezovsky, Tom Sturridge is private banker Dimitri Sidorov (based on Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and Alicia Vikander does her best with the uninteresting role of “Ksenia”, a fictionalised girlfriend who leaves Baranov for Sidorov.
Jude Law, with a bland suit and sinister, thinning combover plays Putin, described as the “tsar” throughout, convincingly fabricating Putin mannerisms like the thin smile, the wince of disgust at weakness or disloyalty, and the brief, fastidious handshake with cowed visitors followed by the curt gesture to the chair where they should sit. (This is in the era before petitioners and diplomats were made to sit at the end of a table the size of an aircraft carrier.) And the (supposedly) fascinating and enigmatic Baranov (the Surkov-style “wizard” or Rasputin-esque power behind the throne) is played by Paul Dano; a former liberal idealist, theatre producer and enthusiast for the anti-Stalin satirical novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which inspired Orwell – but which Surkov, as he climbs the Putin ladder of power, effectively comes to regard as a blueprint for sophisticated repression.
Sadly, Dano’s performance consists of a one-note, smirking, singsong dialogue delivery, almost as if he is speaking under hypnosis, which is soporific both in the way he does it on camera and in the interminable voiceover that drones its way through almost the entire film. (He is supposedly telling his story in flashback to a visiting American academic played by Jeffrey Wright.) Dano’s undirected, undifferentiated portrayal doesn’t have a fraction of the style and subtlety of, say, his performance as Count Bezhukov in the BBC’s War and Peace. And in fact the whole movie is completely without the style and real insight of the comparable fictions we’ve seen lately, such as Peter Morgan’s stage play Patriots, whose London production had Tom Hollander as Berezovsky and Will Keen as Putin, or Kirill Serebrinnikov’s film Limonov: The Ballad with Ben Whishaw as former punk author turned Russian ultra-nationalist Eduard Limonov – who shows up briefly and far less excitingly in this film. Oddly, the Serebrennikov film was based on Emmanuel Carrère’s biographical novel.
Law keeps the movie ticking over with his chilly impersonation of power – part pope, part mobster – but the movie is not especially interested in digging very deeply into his personality. I would love to see instead a Putin movie that shows the true story of how Putin, very excited at the Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Venice Golden Lion victory for The Return in 2003, invited him to tea at the Kremlin and exuberantly brandished his (pirated) DVD copy of the movie. But The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end. Dano’s character doesn’t seem plausible, either as a young liberal or as a fully fledged political power broker, or as the retired bittersweet narrator of the present day. His performance is bloodless … and without magic.
• The Wizard of the Kremlin screened at the Venice film festival.
