★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Try to think of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” now straining hard to build intrigue in theaters, as a Russian version of “The Apprentice.” This time it’s a young Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) getting his strings pulled by a Roy Cohn-ish evil media genius (Paul Dano). Stay with that image and the machinery of the movie will click right into place. You won’t be able to ignore how overstuffed and overlong the movie is, but Law is painting a portrait of Putin as a tyrant-in-training that rings thrillingly, scarily true.
Following the parallels to “The Apprentice,” it’s hard at first to see Putin as a Donald Trump embryo eager to learn the ropes from a dark prince meant to evoke Roy Cohn. First of all, Putin is no rube; he’s a rising KGB officer whose cold stare is already in operational mode. Secondly, Dano is the picture of moon-faced, doughy innocence as his master manipulator, Vadim Baranov, a former theater director who hardly seems well positioned to reshape three decades of life in post-Soviet Russia.
Well, won’t you be surprised. We first meet Baranov, not so loosely based on Putin’s former handler and spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov, at his estate outside Moscow. He’s arranged a meeting with an American professor (Jeffrey Wright), which is merely an excuse to build the movie into a two-and-a-half-hour flashback. Look, it worked for “Amadeus,” when court composer Salieri spilled his guts about Mozart. And there’s lots to know about this so-called “wizard” of the Kremlin.
Jude Law paints a portrait of Putin as a tyrant-in-training that rings thrillingly, scarily true.
A word here about who’s doing the telling. The director is exemplary French auteur Olivier Assayas, best known for such clever personal puzzles as “Summer Hours,” “Demonlover,” “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” and “Personal Shopper.” The script that Assayas wrote with novelist Emmanuel Carrère, is based on a 2022 bestseller by French-Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli. Too many cooks? You bet. But the film, propelled by the two captivating and complex performances from Law and Dano, sustains our interest even over the rough spots.
There’s a lot of yada-yada-yada about Baranov as he bounces from theater to nascent reality TV, then profiteer in the reign of Boris Yeltsin, then a mentorship from oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who hires him to smooth a path to power for Putin.
It takes almost an hour (too long) to get Putin in the picture. That’s when Law takes charge of the movie and holds us in a grip that doesn’t let go. Law doesn’t do a Russian accent. Neither does Dano. It’s jarring that they don’t. The good news is that’re both so good you stop noticing and just go with the flow. That is when Assayas lets you. Alicia Vikander does well as Baranov’s fickle mistress Ksenia with a thing for rich men (enter a wasted Tom Sturridge as her oligarch target), but this bad romance belongs in another film, one I don’t want to see.
It’s also a drag on that Assayas directs as if he’s just immersed himself in a century of Russian politics and wants to cram it all in. But “The Wizard of the Kremlin” isn’t the miniseries it should have been. The Chechen War, the Sochi Olympics, the Moscow terrorist attacks distract from the main event—the match between Putin and Baranov.
The upshot is that Putin wants power and Baranov believes the way to get it is chaos. He’s not wrong. Nothing like havoc to convince a country it needs a strong leader, no matter how many freedoms it has to sacrifice for the alleged privilege. Notice how “The Apprentice” parallels really kick in here as the Trump/Cohn connection mirrors Putin and Baranov.
Law gives us a Putin scarily recognizable as the isolated strongman he became, playing Trump for a patsy, wagering all on the fall of the Ukraine, projecting— like Trump— an invulnerability that the facts don’t bear out. Amid the creative chaos of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” it’s Roy Cohn’s infamous advice to his apprentice that forecast the man Putin became: "Attack— attack— attack, admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory—never acknowledge defeat." Tragic isn’t it, how some things never change.