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Jude Law and Paul Dano - The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025)
Jude Law and Paul Dano in 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' (2025)
In The Wizard of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power was foreseen by no one, least of all Putin. The story of his rise and its context is told by a fictional advisor, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), as recounted to a visiting American academic named Rowland (Jeffrey Wright).
The Wizard of the Kremlin was adapted from a novel by Italian author Giuliao da Empoli by French director Olivier Assayas with an international cast headed by Jude Law as Putin. The Russian autocrat is not the sole real character in a story alive with the history of Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union through the annexation of Crimea.
Vadim invites Rowland, in Moscow researching Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1924 novel We prophesied a totalitarian future, to his rustically elegant dacha in the pale winter woods outside the capital. He had read Rowland’s recent essay on Russia in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, commenting, “You did understand something … not much, but something.”
Rowland is surprised Vadim owns a copy of We and by his appearance. He’s a shy man in a sweater, neither the ruthless henchman nor the mindless sycophant Rowland might have expected. The Wizard of the Kremlin shows Vadim’s life through a series of flashbacks triggered by their conversation, with glimpses of his privileged childhood as the son of a Soviet official and his off-and-on-again romance with Ksenia (Alicia Vikander).
Cultural, Social, Political
Most of his recollections are cultural, social and political. With the end of the Soviet Union came a fluorescence of culture. The once-banned novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mikhail Bulgakov were eagerly devoured, rock music and bad performance art flourished, and Vadim, a theater student, staged an elaborate production of We. Others in Vadim’s circle, the rising class of oligarchs, saw opportunity in the Soviet collapse, seizing state-owned property, buying flashy cars and living without limits. Milton Friedman displaced Karl Marx, and the gray materialism of communism was supplanted by the multicolored materialism of capitalism.
Coming to believe that true culture no longer has “any influence to expect on the world,” Vadim lands a job producing schlocky reality television and becomes the confidant of media oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen). Berezovsky is depicted as the hidden puppet master behind Russia’s ailing, alcoholic president, Boris Yeltsin. Lauded in the west for standing for democracy against the failed 1991 communist coup, Yeltsin then presided over the free fall of “shock capitalism.” Under his administration, the government went bankrupt, the social safety net disintegrated, poverty rose, life expectancy fell—and a former superpower was humiliated on the world stage.
“We need to invent something—and someone new,” Berezovsky decides. He easily convinces Yeltsin to appoint the relatively unknown Putin as prime minister. He has a harder time convincing Putin to accept the promotion. Putin is happy with his current job as director of the FSB (the KGB’s successor) and has to think it over.
Cold, Competent Autocrat
In Jude Law’s spot-on portrayal, Putin is brusque and businesslike, emotionally cold and managerially competent. He never forgives or forgets a slight, including negative references in the media. Putin embodies the need for order after Yeltsin’s chaos and plays on his nation’s injured pride like a concert master. He wants to stop all that talk of how bad life was under Stalin and retains the streetfighter mentality of the Leningrad slum where he was raised. The KGB was his ladder from those streets and imbued him with a restless paranoia. Will it only be a matter of time before suspicion falls on Vadim?
The Wizard of the Kremlin manages to incorporate many sideways glances into the politics that accompanied Putin’s rise to power. Especially fascinating is the deliberately provocative, pro-Putin National Bolshevik Party. Founded by avant-garde poet Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke), it’s an unruly coalition of anarchists, communists, skinheads, gays, Buddhist and Eastern Orthodox believers—a confederacy of grievances against a modern world whose promises could never be kept.
As for Vadim, the occasional stir of conscience causes no change of course for many years. Despite his cynicism, his temperament is artistic—he compares the U.S. and EU sanctions against him to winning an Oscar—and seems to regard his actions as performance art on a global scale. But doubts and regrets begin to gnaw. “I let him get out of the habit of seeing me,” he tells Rowland, explaining his disappearance from Putin’s circle. But will Putin forget him?
