by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Paul Dano, Jude Law, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen
Intro:
... a rattling good yarn ...
Though based on a novel by Giuliano Da Empoli, The Wizard of the Kremlin is in at least one sense a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. It’s obviously centred around real living people — Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) being the most well-known — and its titular spin doctor Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), though invented, was supposedly based on Kremlin strategist Vladislav Surkov. All that should make the film inherently dodgy, even superfluous, but it’s such a rattling good yarn that it doesn’t really matter.
The aforementioned Baranov is an enigmatic individual, an intellectual whose mild softly-spoken demeanour belies enormous ambition and a moral compass so tenuous that we come to question if it ever really existed. His unlikely career trajectory takes him from theatrical producer to — with the assistance of a mega-rich bank owner — Machiavellian political power broker. The period involved is one of great turbulence, even chaos, yet also of terrifying state-imposed ’stability’.
Dramatic events seem to tumble over each other in rapid succession, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the annexation of Crimea, the sinking of the Kursk submarine, the Chechnya war, the rise of the oligarchs, the nihilism of the Night Wolves motorcycle club, and on and on. Violence begets violence, corruption is endemic, and through it all floats the glacially creepy Putin in his inexorable rise from KGB non-entity to president and eventually a sort of latter-day Tsar. And then there are his cronies, “straight out of Richard the Third”.
Occasionally, the dialogue here gets didactic, and while the production values are first-rate — even dazzling at times — the whole thing does look a bit like an expensive Netflix movie. Yet somehow, this also pales into insignificance next to the sheer compelling enjoyability of the story. And Jude Law’s portrayal of Putin, steely gaze and all, is so uncanny that he seems to be onscreen a lot more than he is. Equally pitch-perfect is the ending, apparently not taken from the novel but added by director Olivier Assayas.
Recommended.
