{"id":123042,"date":"2025-08-31T15:20:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T15:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/123042\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T15:20:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T15:20:07","slug":"jude-law-plays-putin-for-assayas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/123042\/","title":{"rendered":"Jude Law Plays Putin for Assayas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs a French auteur with international pedigree, Olivier Assayas<\/a> likes to split his time between intimate homegrown dramas and kinetic thrillers that never stay in the same place for too long. On one side, there are the director\u2019s very Gallic works like Late August, Early September, Summer Hours, Non-Fiction<\/a> and recent COVID comedy Suspended Time<\/a>. And on the other there are English-language flicks like Boarding Gate, Demonlover, Personal Shopper and Wasp Network <\/a>that are constantly in movement, hopping between continents, cities and multiple genres (suspense, horror, espionage, etc.).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe writer-director\u2019s sprawling new feature, The Wizard of the Kremlin, clearly falls into the latter category, chronicling three decades of life in post-Soviet Russia that saw the rise, and further rise, of Vladimir Putin to supreme leader of the land (or \u201ctsar,\u201d as he\u2019s referred to by everyone). The film is filled to the brim with real people and incidents, providing an entertaining primer to explain how a former Communist country was transformed into a cutthroat capitalist regime ruled by an authoritarian modeling himself on Stalin.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Wizard of the Kremlin\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA portrait of power that’s ambitious to a fault.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, Jeffrey Wright, Jude Law
Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenwriters: Olivier Assayas, Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re, based on the novel by Giuliano da Empoli
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 36 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAssayas\u2019 movie coasts swiftly along, from the fall of the U.S.S.R in the late 1980s to the 2014 invasion of Crimea, with the director applying a fluid, unfussy style as he leaps between offices, hotels, mansions, forests, and streets in Moscow, London and other capitals. But things tend to get muddled whenever he slows down and tries to create real drama or memorable characters, at which point The Wizard of the Kremlin feels clunky and expository, as if the actors were reciting lines from the totalitarian\u2019s playbook.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe script (written by Assayas and novelist Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re, who appears in a small cameo) is based on French-Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli\u2019s bestselling novel from 2022, which was itself based on years of research and didn\u2019t fictionalize all that much except for its main character \u2014 the titular \u201cwizard\u201d inspired by Putin\u2019s former right-hand man and spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov. Here he\u2019s been renamed Vadim (or Vlad) Baranov and is played by Paul Dano<\/a> in the actor\u2019s charmingly offhand and cerebral manner.<\/p>\n

\n\tDano very much anchors the film, even if his character remains something of a cypher, and not necessarily a likable one, throughout the story. We first meet him when an American professor (Jeffrey Wright<\/a>) is summoned to his massive estate outside Moscow. The two exchange a few pleasantries, including about their favorite writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1921 dystopian novel, We, famously inspired Orwell\u2019s 1984. Afterwards, Vlad sits down and begins to tell his tale, which lasts for the next two-and-a-half hours.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe framing device feels a bit contrived, but the scenes between Dano and Wright are good enough to keep us interested. The rest of the action follows Baranov in flashback as he goes from punkish theater director at the tail end of the Soviet era to profiteer during the chaotic reign of a drunken Boris Yeltsin, until he becomes a successful reality TV producer during a \u201890s economic boom that saw the rise of Russia\u2019s oligarch class. One of them \u2014 the real Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) \u2014 takes Baranov under his wing to help orchestrate the path to power of Putin (Jude Law), a cold, crafty and not-very-marketable former spy who was appointed by Yeltsin to run the FSB (ex-KGB) in 1998.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you just flinched while reading the name Jude Law, it\u2019s certainly jarring when he first appears as Russia\u2019s future dictator (is there another word for it?) and warmonger, not to mention a world leader committing crimes against humanity that are still happening right now. Lots of people love Law; far fewer love Putin. But the actor slips into the role flawlessly (with the help of good makeup), never overdoing it and adding a fair amount of gravitas to the constantly shifting scenery. Assayas\u2019 film gains momentum whenever he\u2019s on screen, and thus loses steam when Putin disappears for much of the third act. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe plot also gets bogged down in too many characters and events, which may be pivotal to explaining recent Russian history but not necessarily suitable to a gripping narrative. Assayas wants to pack everything and everyone in \u2014 from the Chechen War to the Moscow terrorist attacks to the Sochi Olympics, from dissident poet and politician Edouard Liminov (Magne-Havard Brekke) to Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin (Andris Keiss), casting lookalikes to play those brief parts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Wizard of the Kremlin can feel like a six-hour miniseries screened at 1.5x speed, so much does it zip around to try and tell the full story. And it\u2019s clearly an incredible story, revealing how Baranov used his savvy media skills to create the myth of Vladimir Putin, doping the public into propping up a seemingly modest man who turned into a tyrant. Many of the oligarchs backed Putin\u2019s rise, and those who eventually turned on him didn\u2019t end well. (For those unfamiliar with Berezovsky\u2019s fate, it features prominently in the last act.) \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rise of an authoritarian via a ruthless manipulator recalls last year\u2019s Donald Trump portrait The Apprentice<\/a> in more ways than one, although that film smartly limited its scope to two major players and time periods. Assayas\u2019 movie is far more comprehensive but winds up overextending itself. In its closing reels, it casts aside the historical record for an invented domestic drama about Baranov\u2019s love affair with on-and-off girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander<\/a>), who\u2019s attracted to powerful men (including fictional oligarch Dimitry Sidorov, played by Tom Sturridge), though cherishes her own freedom (and yachts and jewelry). Compared to Putin\u2019s attempts at world domination, this feels like trite stuff.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut perhaps the main problem is that we really don\u2019t get to know Baranov intimately, even if he narrates the story and appears in nearly every scene. Both by choice and design, he remains a man in the shadows, which means we don\u2019t exactly care about his emotional squabbles, nor about what happens to him in the film\u2019s shock finale.<\/p>\n

\n\tNeither Baranov nor Putin \u2014 nor the many oligarchs, whether dead or alive \u2014 are the protagonists of The Wizard of the Kremlin, whose main character is ultimately Russia itself. In that sense, Assayas has crafted an ambitious chronicle that serves up plenty of compelling facts, but never turns them into the stuff of legend. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a French auteur with international pedigree, Olivier Assayas likes to split his time between intimate homegrown dramas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[64738,88,78609,206,78610,78607,15741,73834,24350,24388],"class_list":["post-123042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alicia-vikander","tag-entertainment","tag-jeffrey-wright","tag-movies","tag-olivier-assayas","tag-paul-dano","tag-venice","tag-venice-2025","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}