In 1987 Oliver Stone made a film with “Wall Street”, whose main character Gordon Gordon Gekko should actually be a despised character-and yet Michael Douglas' “Gier (…) is good!” A similar fate could theoretically also be able to overcome the title-giving power magician from “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, even if the film is missing from the resounding mainstream appeal of a “Wall Street”: Based on the real Putin chief ideologist Vladislaw Surkow, the fictional Kremlin Fixer Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano) delivers a pretty Impressive idea of how to get power in the 21st century and – more importantly – how to keep it.
The underlying Roman “The Magician of the Kremlin”* was only published in 2022-written by Giuliano da Empoli, who, as a political non-fiction author and ex-consultant, understands the Italian head of government almost exactly what he writes about. The film adaptation therefore appears comparatively quickly. But if a template is advertised as a “novel of the hour”, you have to hurry so that it does not become a “film from yesterday”. But at least this accusation will certainly do nobody to the renowned author filmmaker Oliver Assayas (“Irma VEP”), after all, many of the strategies torn in the film are now even more radical.
Understand Putin or a Putin understander?
At the same time, the adaptation, which is particularly important in the second half, will certainly have to take similar criticisms to the multiple award-winning novel: Putin is too good-and at the same time the invented encounter between an American journalist (Jeffrey Wright) and the also invented Putin-Flüsterer Baranov will never be so clear what is now a fact and what fiction is. Only these objections unfortunately pass the core of the film, because in the end it is less about Putin (tries on the showered hair, but luckily not on the accent: Jude Law) or Putin's Russia, but above all (absolute).
Vadim Baranov has invited his American guest for a joint worship of the anti-total author Jewgenij Samjatin, whose “we” is considered to be the predecessor of George Orwell's “1984”. Now he tells him over coffee and cake-how he first used the new freedom after breaking apart the Soviet Union as a theater director and then as a producer of reality TV formats as an attention. And how he, who apparently understood what his compatriots really want to see and hear, finally became one of the central consultants of the Vladimir Putin, who was headed as a presidential candidate …
The Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), embodied by Paul Dano, is based on the roughly existing Putin chief ideologist Vladislaw Surkow, at least on the rough.
Since the striking success of his terrorist biopics “Carlos-The Schakal”, which has also been published as a mini series, the otherwise well-known Olivier Assayas, known for classic autor films such as the Kristen-Stewart master works “The Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper” Nineties are now making up the post-Soviet Russia-and again a lot of research work has been flowed into the film.
After all, everything is really possible-from Putin's election to the president of the second Chechen War, the Course accident, the clearing of the oligarchs, hiring the night wolves and the annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea. The fact that protagonist Baranov was really in the room with every central political angle of the last 20 years or had other fingers in the game makes him almost a kind of totalitarian Forrest Gump.
The intoxication of power
Paul Dano does not play the figure at all as a gray eminence that pursues her dark plans in the background, but as an almost emotionless, very rarely his monotonous tuning or lowering fixer, which is simply very good in what he is doing. This makes “The Wizard of the Kremlin” a Kremlin variant of “Ray Donovan” or the autocratic counterpart to “The West Wing”-you are actually drawn into the narrative that is always rapidly hurried by the recent Russian history …
… and you sometimes have to pull yourself out so as not to accidentally keep your fingers crossed for the greedy. But that does not make Empoli and Assayas into potential Putin-based, but to authors who consider their audience to be smart enough to see things without a constantly raised index finger. Although it is no longer so easy with the “looking through” at some point, because “The Wizard of the Kremlin” even increases the pace again despite its proud term. Then some late episodes such as the Sochi Olympics or the Internet troll factories suddenly appear as if they had also been added to them.
Conclusion: A convincing two and a half hour crash course does in all things that caught so many different events of the recent Russian past that in the second half at some point they only rush past you.
We saw “The Wizard of the Kremlin” at the Venice Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated his world premiere as part of the official competition.