Despite such philosophizing, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” can only superficially be called a movie of ideas; it’s a movie of strategies rather than of ideologies, of how power is used rather than why. Assayas takes a cynical and clichéd view regarding temptation and corruption, worldly rewards of security and pleasure, even ego and pride, while having nothing to say about the transformations envisioned or the values embodied in the exercise of political authority. In a way, this void is built into the movie’s very setup: nearly the entire film is an illustration of Vadim’s narration to Lawrence, his self-portrayal to a researcher who will in turn convey it to the world. The story takes Vadim at his word. Just as Adolf Eichmann and Albert Speer portrayed themselves not as true believers but as mere functionaries, so Vadim presents himself to Lawrence as a master of method, not of principle. What’s more, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” does the same for the character of Putin as described by Vadim. It’s hard to imagine Assayas bothering to make a two-and-a-quarter-hour feature just to show engineers of atrocities concealing their motives. Then again, the title card doesn’t promise anything more, or better: if fictionalization is the point, then Assayas should have gone all the way and flaunted the movie’s inventions.
While watching “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” I found myself thinking wistfully of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s recently released film “The Misconceived,” which he made by means of motion-capture technology and animated with video-game software, yielding a cast of realistic-looking people except for one, a young man who’s a cartoon character and reminds me of a Keebler elf. There’s unintentional comedy in the earnest impersonations that Assayas’s movie relies on, and it would have been improved by a similarly overt embrace of its absurdities. If Assayas had Wilkins’s imagination he might have forthrightly distinguished historical characters from made-up ones, rendering the titular wizard in overtly artificial form. As is, Assayas’s ambiguous fictionalization brings to mind Ali Abbasi’s 2024 film “The Apprentice,” a bio-pic of Donald Trump that depoliticized the character and made his moral failings strictly personal. What both movies miss are extremes of authentic political critique—or of blatant mockery.
One of the prime themes of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the relative ease with which the public can be manipulated. There’s little gap, the movie suggests, between Vadim’s youthful ambitions in the theatre and his later maneuvers in statecraft (which he considers merely “a game” but also “the only game worth playing”). Yet a truly political movie about the wizard and the beneficiary of his wizardry would have had to break the frame of Vadim’s calculated confession to Lawrence, getting outside the bubble of executive power to the people whom it acts upon. Assayas portrays the Russian populace as merely manipulated, as if voters were blank slates for effective propaganda rather than people with moral compasses, capacities for judgment and humanity, ideas and opinions that demagogues recognize and stoke.
The movie only hints at the underlying social tendencies that a populist exploits. Vadim theorizes that there are two dimensions to society, the “horizontal” of daily life and the “vertical” of authority; the freed-up Russia of the post-Soviet era offers the former but not the latter, he contends, and Putin’s candidacy can succeed by providing the missing sense of top-down order. Once Putin does take power, he schemes to make use of the same “fury” that, he asserts, made Russians in fact love Stalin’s cruelty. There’s not a word about ideology, about political principles, about what sort of society the new regime is meant to deliver. The only doctrine is delivered by Berezovsky, who, in posh but fretful exile in the south of France, complains to Vadim about what Putin has done: “We managed to build a free country . . . for the first time in Russian history, and you have wrecked all that in just a few years. You turned Russia back into what it always was: a prison the size of a country, just like in the Soviet times.” The movie thus offers a complaint about the end results of Putinism, not about the ideas—the emotions, the enthusiasms, the resentments, the hatreds—that brought it about. As such, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is a movie of political passivity, delivering blandly detached observations to be rued from the comfort of a seat in a theatre.
